When George and Richard Cadbury took over their father John’s growing chocolate and cocoa business in 1861 their factory was located in the centre of Birmingham. As the business grew they needed to expand, and in 1879 they relocated four miles to the south to a rural site which they named “Bournville”, tying the name of a local watercourse, The Bourn, with the French epithet ville.
The choice of site was practical: it was farmland with easy access to the Worcester & Birmingham Canal and the Birmingham West Suburban Railway which was opened in phases between 1876 and 1885, which enabled bulk freight to reach the factory avoiding the traffic of central Birmingham.
This was no innovation. Sir Titus Saltaire had already moved his alpaca mill from the centre of Bradford to a greenfield site he called “Saltaire” and constructed a village of high-quality workers’ housing between 1851 and 1871.
Yet the Cadburys had higher ideals: Saltaire is attractive but its rectilinear layout is distinctly urban; Bournville was, from the outset, intended to be a garden village. In 1893 George Cadbury bought an initial 120 acres of additional land adjoining the factory to start a development that ultimately reached 1,000 acres accommodating a population of 23,000 in 7,800 homes.
Bournville housing was from the start available to any prospective occupants, irrespective of whether they were Cadbury employees, and the houses were let on 999-year leases, rather than rented. The leasehold policy enabled the Bournville Building Estate to retain control of the village environment with the purpose of “maintaining the rural appearance of the district”. At the same time, the financial structure of the scheme was intended to make it practically self-supporting and independent of the fortunes of the Cadbury business.
The Estate Architect, twenty-year-old William Alexander Harvey, had supervision of all design and construction – indeed, he appears to have done most of the designing himself. The master-specification for the dwellings stipulated a fixed bath and a spacious garden. Each house had, by the terms of the lease, to cost at least £150, and 50% mortgages were available at 2½% interest over fifteen years. Within three years some less scrupulous occupiers were selling their leases at profits of over 30%. Subsequent housing was constructed over the following few years for rent, apparently to cater for workers who could not or would not take on the financial commitment required by the original scheme.
A further group of potential inhabitants were served by Richard Cadbury’s Bournville Almshouse Trust, which built in 1897 dwellings for pensioners, again not necessarily from the family firm, financed by the rentals of thirty-five adjacent houses let to ordinary tenants. The architect for this attractive courtyard-development was Ewan Harper.
George Cadbury made over the whole of his Bournville Building Estate to a further charity, the Bournville Village Trust, in 1900, initially endowed with 313 dwellings on a total of 330 acres with the expressed intention “to ameliorate the conditions of the labouring classes, in Birmingham and elsewhere in Great Britain…by the provision of improved dwellings”.
To the present day Bournville bears the stamp of its Quaker founder. It has a strong community base which maintains George Cadbury’s teetotal principles: the local populating saw off Tesco’s application for a drinks licence for its nearby convenience store.
The extensive sporting facilities include playing fields at Rowheath, west of the village, and near to the chocolate factory, the Borunville Baths, designed by G H Lewin (1902-4), and are described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, in The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (Penguin 1966), as “the most impressive architectural extravaganza on the whole estate”.
The centre of the village – now the visitor centre – is the Rest House (W Alexander Harvey 1913), commemorating George and Elizabeth Cadbury’s silver wedding and based on the Yarn Market at Dunster, Somerset. Nearby stand two rescued fourteenth-century timber houses, Selly Manor House and Minworth Greaves Manor, from the city centre.
There are several educational facilities – Ruskin Hall, the village institute (W Alexander Harvey 1902-5, extended 1928, 1956 and 1966), the Junior School (Harvey 1905) and Infants’ School (Harvey 1910) and the Day Continuation Schools (John Ramsay Armstrong 1925) – and several places of worship – the Friends’ Meeting House (W Alexander Harvey 1905), the Anglican Church of St Francis of Assisi (W Alexander Harvey & H G Wicks 1924-5) and the Saint Prince Lazar Serbian Orthodox Church (Dragomir Tadić 1968).
And it has a Carillon, originally dating from 1906, enlarged in 1923 and completely reconstructed in 1934.
It’s an interesting place to visit.