Coventry Building Society Arena sits in Longford on the northern edge of Coventry, a few hundred metres from junction 3 of the M6, and that is its biggest advantage on delivery: a vehicle leaves the motorway and is at the gate minutes later. The exhibition hall has two ground-level vehicle doors, at the north and south entrances, so unloading needs no dock and no ramp. We carry stands and exhibits here from Poland, hold them in Kielce before departure and collect them after breakdown.
The name stayed, the owner changed twice
For years the venue was called the Ricoh Arena, and that name still turns up in older satnav data and in exhibitor packs from a few seasons back. The current name is Coventry Building Society Arena. Ownership has changed twice: in November 2022 Frasers Group bought it out of administration, and in August 2025 Coventry City football club acquired it together with the hotel and casino on site. For a driver this has one practical consequence: contact details and gate names in old instructions may be out of date. It is also worth knowing that two postcodes circulate, because the venue contact pages print CV6 6AQ while its own map link points to CV6 6GE. We navigate to the one in the current exhibitor manual and confirm it with the venue office.
Getting there, from the port of entry to the gate
From the Channel crossing the route runs on the M20 and M25, then the M40 and M42 to the M6, or the M1 and M6 from the east. Coming through the east coast ports, the vehicle joins the M6 from the Midlands side. The final stretch is short: from M6 junction 3 you take the A444, Phoenix Way, then Judds Lane and Rowleys Green Lane. The M69 arrives from Leicester, the M40 from the south, and the A46 from Warwick and Kenilworth. Corridor and port choice is covered in the article on the Dover and east coast corridors, and the wider region in the piece on transport to Birmingham and the Midlands.
What makes this venue different from an ordinary hall
The main difference is not the hall itself but what surrounds it. The exhibition space is a single pillar-free hall of roughly six thousand square metres, divisible by a moving wall into a four thousand and a two thousand square metre section. The absence of pillars simplifies stand planning and the placing of heavy exhibits. But the hall stands on a site it shares with a football stadium, an indoor arena, a hotel, a casino and its own railway station. The yard is not the exhibition hall property alone.
Two things follow from that when planning. First, two different events can run on the site at the same time, and vehicle movements are then handled differently from a day when only the hall is working. Second, the car parks are run by a commercial operator, there are four of them holding over two thousand two hundred spaces between them, and an hour-long hold on departures applies once an event finishes. A vehicle that has finished unloading does not sit in the yard until evening; it leaves according to venue rules. That belongs in the schedule, because on a run from Poland the driver has his own driving-time limits after unloading.
Clean air zones: Coventry has none
Coventry has no charging clean air zone. The city council states that in February 2020 the government decided the city would not need a class D zone and that a package of other measures was introduced instead. The government list of charging zones covers Bath, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Portsmouth, Sheffield and Tyneside. Birmingham operates a class D zone inside the A4540 ring road, in the city centre itself, about thirty kilometres west of the venue, and the M6 approach does not touch it. If the same run then continues into central Birmingham, the maths changes. We gather the rules in the article on UK clean air zones.
What to settle before the vehicle leaves Poland
We do not quote build-up hours or dates, because the organiser sets those separately for every edition and they change from year to year. What we do give is the list of questions to ask, and who to ask. To the show organiser: hall number and section, north or south entrance, how vehicles are booked in and passes collected, whether a vehicle may enter the hall for your stand, and who supplies the forklift. To the venue team: where the vehicle waits before entry and where it goes after unloading. The method for counting the whole schedule backwards is in the article on the build-up and breakdown calendar, and the split of roles between venue, organiser and carrier in the piece on the official fair forwarder and your own carrier.
What we do at our end
We collect stands and exhibits in Poland, and for exhibitors from Czechia, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary we gather the load through our hub. The Kielce base sits about 4 km from the fairground, a few minutes away, and works around the clock, so a complete set can wait there instead of standing in the exhibitor yard. A groupage vehicle waits for the next scheduled line departure. On the British side the load usually passes through a cross-dock at our warehouse in Milton Keynes, which gives two transhipments across the whole route: the hub in Poland and Milton Keynes. At the venue we deliver to the handover point, and from there the venue equipment and staff take over. We commit to an hour at the gate, because that is what we control; the unloading sequence inside the grounds is set by the venue.
Groupage or a dedicated vehicle
The line runs at roughly a third of a trailer, about twelve pallets. Below that threshold groupage is cheaper and usually enough, because a smaller stand will not fill a vehicle anyway. Above it the arithmetic turns in favour of a dedicated vehicle that travels without transhipment and arrives at the gate in one piece. At Coventry there is a further geographic argument: the venue sits right beside the motorway, so a dedicated vehicle loses less time on the approach than at venues in dense urban streets. We break down the components of that decision in the article on choosing between FTL and groupage.
Sources
- Coventry Building Society Arena: venue site, directions and exhibition halls
- Coventry City Council: air quality and the decision against a charging zone
- GOV.UK: list of British charging clean air zones
Exhibiting in Coventry? Send the hall number, item list and build-up window from the organiser manual through the quotation form and we will set up the delivery and the return. The full event service is described on the exhibition logistics page.
