The current City Arms only dates from 1930, but the pub’s history goes back to 1852, when two corner building plots were bought from the Freehold Land Society by Thomas Dylke, a Coventry watchmaker, for £55 5s 0d each. The following year Dylke sold them to Benjamin Bird for £110 7s 6d the pair. Bird had previously run the ‘Engine Inn’ in Longford, and seeing newly developed Earlsdon without a pub, he lost no time in building one he named the City Arms.
By 1872 Benjamin, now aged 64, retired and sold to the Flowers family, the Stratford-on-Avon brewers, for £700. A succession of lessee landlords followed. In 1889 a bowling and skittle alley was erected — a favourite relaxation for the local watchmakers. The most famous incumbent was Mrs Mary Jane Cooper, known to all as ‘Ma’ Cooper, who had been nursemaid to the six children of Edgar Flowers. Short, stout, strict and enormously kind, she reigned supreme for twenty-five years and died at the pub in 1921, her funeral attended by hundreds of mourners.
In 1931 the old building was demolished and replaced by the mock-Tudor building we see today, with prints depicting Shakespeare plays in almost every room. In the 1990s the City Arms was taken over by Wetherspoons and underwent a major refurbishment to create the single large drinking area that exists today.