On Monday 25th September audiences had the opportunity to swim under the beautiful seven metre illuminated moon suspended above Coventry’s much loved Olympic pool as this stunning artwork made its first UK appearance in a swimming pool. On Friday 29th September the artwork moved to Coventry Cathedral.
Check out the full programme for both venues here as PdF.
The Olympic pool hosted a number of special events beneath the pool including; Balbir Singh performing The Broken Tusk, a Wave Rave, a CUSU Moonlight Pool Party, and an LGBTQ Pool Party! Click here for the full list of events in the swimming pool.
Significance of the Moonlight Sonata to Coventry
The Coventry blitz was a series of bombing raids that took place on the city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during the Second World War by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). The most devastating of these attacks occurred on the evening of 14 November 1940. The aid raid on Coventry on the night of 14 November 1940 was the single most concentrated attack on a British city in the Second World War.
Codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’, the raid lasted for 11 hours and involved nearly 500 Luftwaffe bombers, gathered from airfields all over occupied Europe. The aim was to knock out Coventry as a major centre for war production. It was said too, that Hitler ordered the raid as revenge on an RAF attack on Munich.
14 November was a brilliant moonlit night, so bright that the traffic could move around on the road without light. The Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of high explosive, 30,000 incendiaries and 50 landmines. It was also trying out a new weapon, the exploding incendiary.
Coventry lost not only its great mediaeval church of St Michael’s, the only English Cathedral to be destroyed in the Second World War, but its central library and market hall, hundreds of shops and public building and 16th century Palace Yard, where James II had once held court.
So for the Museum of the Moon to be presented within the cathedral is poignant, for its citizens.
