Although many of our city's buildings could be rebuilt, Coventry is a place with a very full history, and many of the buildings lost to the bombing were centuries old and absolutely irreplaceable. As I've lamented elsewhere in this website, many of our architectural gems disappeared long before the war. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the town planners of the day had no qualms in demolishing our proud city gates, when a simple re-routing of a street could have allowed them to be preserved. And only a few years before the war, Great and Little Butcher Row, Palmer Lane and parts of Cross Cheaping were demolished for the building of Trinity Street.