Bournville village

History

A fear of the speculators

When Richard and George Cadbury moved their works to Bournville in 1879 they built sixteen houses for foremen beside it. As the factory grew, so did the value of the fields round it, and George could see what was coming. If he did nothing, builders would hem the factory in with the same tight streets of back-to-backs that he had left behind. In 1893 he bought about 120 acres near the works and began to plan a village.

His aim, in the brothers’ words as quoted by the Bournville Village Trust, was to “alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living.” The estate was not to be a company town. The houses were open to anyone, and the community was meant to be mixed in class and occupation.

Cottages and gardens

Building began in 1895. The Birmingham architect William Alexander Harvey, later consulting architect to the trust, designed many of its cottages and public buildings in an Arts and Crafts style. Roads were wide and lined with trees, houses had large gardens, and no building could cover more than a quarter of its plot. At least a tenth of the land, besides roads and gardens, was kept for parks and recreation grounds. By 1900 there were 313 houses.

Given away

In 1900 George Cadbury handed the whole estate, then about 500 acres including the village, to the Bournville Village Trust, under the Charity Commissioners. The rents had to pay for upkeep, with any surplus spent on extending the estate and on housing reform elsewhere. At the date of the gift the trust property was valued at £172,724 and had 370 houses. The trust was separate from the Cadbury business, though family members served as trustees. The deed barred any pub without the trustees’ consent.

The green

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

The heart of the village was the triangular green. Around it went the community buildings, nearly all by Harvey. The junior school, built in 1902–05, has a tower with a carillon of 48 bells in its present form of 1934 and, inside, frescoes of 1914. The Friends’ Meeting House of 1905 was built at George Cadbury’s expense and had an organ to welcome other Christians, so that locals called it the ‘Quaker Cathedral’. The octagonal Rest House of 1914, modelled on an old market building at Dunster in Somerset, celebrated George and Elizabeth Cadbury’s silver wedding. Two old timber-framed houses, Selly Manor and Minworth Greaves, were taken down elsewhere and rebuilt here in 1912–16 and 1929–32. Richard Cadbury’s almshouses of 1897, round a quadrangle on Mary Vale Road, were endowed by the rents of houses he built beside them.

Healthier lives

Bournville became a showpiece. Figures quoted by George Cadbury’s biographer for the five years to 1919 gave it a death rate of 7.7 per thousand, against 13.7 for Birmingham, and an infant death rate of 51 per thousand births, against 101 for the city. The village influenced the garden city movement and was copied in Britain and abroad.

When George Cadbury died in 1922 his ashes were placed in a columbarium at the Meeting House on the green. The estate kept growing, and today it covers about 1,000 acres and houses more than 25,000 people.

What happened here?

George Cadbury bought land in 1893, began building in 1895 and in 1900 gave the estate to the Bournville Village Trust, which still runs it. Around the green came schools, a meeting house, the Rest House, almshouses and two rebuilt medieval houses.