I know exactly what you mean. I quite often drive through the old industrial section of Birmingham, and all those old red brick factories long since fallen derelict are hauntingly beautiful. If I could I'd see them kept just as they are.

Sadly Coventry has almost no decent architecture seeing as it was all flattened in WW2. It's all depressingly 1950s utilitarian, in stark contrast to the medieval remnants of the first town that was here.