Laid down by Cammell Laird and Company, Limited, at Birkenhead on 29 January 1973, she was launched on 21 June 1974 and accepted into service on 20 October 1978 at a cost of £37,900,000.

Type 42 destroyers were fitted with the Sea Dart surface-to-air missiles designed in the 1960s to counter threats from crewed aircraft.

Sea Dart was constrained by limitations on its firing capacity and reaction time, but did prove itself during the Falklands War with seven kills, three of these attributed to Coventry.

[3] Once Springtrain '82 was complete, Coventry was scheduled to return to the UK prior to a deployment on an intelligence-gathering mission against Soviet naval forces in the Barents Sea, for which the ship had been fitted with special communications monitoring equipment.

On 27 April, Coventry, in company with Glamorgan, Glasgow, Arrow and Sheffield, entered the Total Exclusion Zone, a 200-mile cordon around the Falkland Islands.

One missile missed and the other hit a small boat, knocking out the radio aerials and slightly injuring a crewman manning a 20 mm gun.

Glasgow's Lynx fired two more Sea Skua, and the vessel retreated, with eight crew killed, eight wounded and heavy damage.

Broadsword reported that her radar tracked the missiles merging with the pair of contacts (call signs Litro and Pepe), but they missed the aircraft.

Coventry's captain, David Hart Dyke, claimed that two A-4C Skyhawks of Grupo 4 were shot down by Sea Darts (C-303 and C-313).

However, both were actually lost to bad weather, and both wrecks were found on South Jason Island,[5] one on the northwest side of the cliffs, the other in shallow waters on the southwest.

Following the loss of Sheffield, a new air defence tactic was devised to try to maximise the task group's remaining assets.

[5][page needed] Of the bombs released, one bounced off the sea and struck Broadsword's flight deck and, though it failed to explode, wrecked the ship's Westland Lynx helicopter.

Coventry claimed to have hit the second Skyhawk (Captain Pablo Marcos Carballo) in the tail with small arms fire, although the aircraft returned safely to Argentina.

The latter hit caused critical damage as it breached the bulkhead between the forward and aft engine rooms, exposing the largest open space in the ship to uncontrollable flooding.

[11] One of the wounded, Paul Mills, suffered complications from a skull fracture sustained in the sinking of the ship and later died on 29 March 1983; he is buried in his home town of Swavesey, Cambridgeshire.

Five months after Coventry sank, a RN Fleet Diving Team conducted an underwater survey of the wreck, which they found lying on her port side in approximately 100 metres (330 ft) of water.

This survey was the beginning of "Operation Blackleg", a series of dives to recover classified documentation and equipment and to make the remaining weapons safe by means of explosive demolition.

[17] The dive team recovered several personal items belonging to Hart Dyke and other officers along with the ship's battle ensign, later presented to the next Coventry, a Type 22 frigate.