Distance: 5.2 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: easy

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Walk from central Birmingham to the Cadbury factory village of Bournville, mostly along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. Walk goes to Cadbury World and Selly Manor.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Bournville Chocolate Box Village

A Quaker family originally from South West England called the Cadbury’s began making and selling chocolate in central Birmingham in the early 19th Century.

Their first factory stood in a crowded inner city area, just down from where the Town Hall stands, now long redeveloped. As the firm expanded, the brother’s Richard and George who were running the family company in the 1870s decided to move out of central Birmingham to a larger, cheaper site outside the city.

At the time the Birmingham West Suburban Railway was being constructed across the affluent suburb of Edgbaston and out into sparsely populated areas of northern Worcestershire adjacent to Bimingham’s southern boundary. The railway company was using land owned by the Worcester and Birmingham Canal Company to construct their track. This means that the two forms of transport ran close together, a benefit for the Cadbury’s if they chose to move south into northern Worcestershire to build their new factory, as their milk tended to come by canal, while raw sugar and coca came by rail which was also how their finished product was shipped. The railway would also allow the company to bring in workers from central Birmingham and enable them to get home again at the end of their shifts.

In 1879 Cadbury’s purchased the Bournbrook Hall estate just on the other side of the canal and new railway line from the north Worcestershire village of Stirchley which was already served by the new railway. Here they began building their new much larger factory. They were far from the only central Birmingham company to migrate production into northern Worcestershire, following the course of the new railway, during those years. The Birmingham Battery Metals Company set up its new foundry in Selly Oak, where the Dudley No. 2 Canal joined the Worcester and Birmingham’s navigation, in 1878.   

It was on Bournbrook Hall’s land that the Cadbury’s constructed their new factory. A small number of scattered terraces of houses constructed for key factory workers deemed to be needed close to the works at all times, and built along the lanes of the rural area still known as Bournbrook, followed. However, Bournville the Birmingham suburb developed in the shadow of the Cadbury factory was not established until the mid-1890s.

1895 saw construction start on what the Cadbury family hoped would be a “model village”. The firm and the family who controlled a major stake in it were flush with cash, their company having ridden the late Victorian wave of corporate success for large firms, with clever marketing (by the standards of the 19th Century), that produced relatively inexpensive consumer goods for the mass market. Indeed the name Bournville itself is testimony to Cadbury’s marketing flare, having been concocted and supplanted the older term Bournbrook (which lives on as the name of the lower portion of Selly Oak) purely to give the location of their chocolate factory an appetising Belgian sounding twist.

By 1895 the area that became south Birmingham, after the city gobbled up Worcestershire’s old King’s Norton and Northfield Urban District in 1911, was increasingly urban in character. Speculative builders like Henry Barber – whose fortune founded the Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham after his death – were building out from the new railway stations and along the main roads to carpet the north Worcestershire hills and dells with new terraces of houses.

For a myriad of reasons the Cadbury family, and George Cadbury in particular were critical of this. Unlike others amongst the old non-conformist families that controlled Birmingham’s larger industrial firms, the Cadbury’s remained fairly well wedded to liberal radicalism supporting many progressive causes that during the 20th Century became social democratic staples.   

Town planning and conservation (both of nature and of historic buildings), albeit in a sanitised and defanged form from that dreamed in different ways up by Henry George and William Morris, was a key component of their world view. Alongside their peers the Rowntree’s in York, and the not dissimilar Lever family (also grown rich from the late Victorian consumer products boom) on the Wirral, the Cadbury’s wanted to build homes and a community for sections of their workforce which was clean, aesthetically pleasing and that encouraged what they considered good conduct and positive habits.

Based upon cutting edge town planning principles established by figures like Raymond Unwin and using the arts and craft style, the earliest phases of Bournville were constructed prior to the First World War. In 1900 an independent trust, the Bournville Village Trust, which in time evolved to become a housing association, was established to guide the development of the village.

The development of Bournville continued after the First World War with the provision of sporting facilities and an Anglican parish church, to complement the swimming baths, parks, friends meeting house, shopping parade, primary school and adult education institutions already established. A distinctive trait of Bournville to this day is the efforts at conserving elements of the suburb’s former countryside setting. As well as quintessential and idiosyncratic early 20th Century folkish flourishes like the Carillon, Rest House and museum of two rescued historic buildings: Selly Manor and Minworth Greaves, adjacent to Bournville Green. 

It must be noted that not every Cadbury worker lived in Bournville, many still commuted to work or lived in adjacent areas of Birmingham even a century ago. And indeed some non-Cadbury’s workers were resident in the community from the start. While the housing provided was of a universally high standard, standards which still seem pretty good today, over 100 years after many of the Bournville houses were built, it was not intended as an egalitarian community. Quite pointedly the houses which were intended to be occupied by managers are substantially larger and more ornate than those intended for run of the mill workers, with the parkland around the Cadbury family’s own mansion-like dwellings setting them even further apart.

In truth while the Cadbury’s provided their British workforce with good housing, health insurance, communal facilities, sickness benefits and pensions, at a time when provision of those things was even patchier than today, their business was just as based upon extracting wealth and resources from workers both in the UK and in colonised parts of the world as any other.

Nothing about the set-up of either Bournville, or the factory that had called it into being, could be considered democratic. Much like the design of the wider British welfare state and social provision which emerged from late Victorian and Edwardian radical liberalism, whether at work, rest or play, Bournville residents could expect to be provided for, very occasionally consulted, but never allowed to determine provision or the allocation of resources: ever.

While well known in the early 20th Century due to a scandal which saw Cadbury’s try and gag journalists by suing them for libel, the company and the family’s seeming lack of concern for the workers whose labour produced the raw materials that underpinned their wealth. By the end of the 19th Century in an attempt to pursue even more profit to plough into projects like Bournville, Cadbury’s was sourcing cocoa from Portugal’s island colonies off the west coast of Africa. Here the raw cocoa was cheap in part because even the rudimentary labour standards prevailing in Britain’s Caribbean colonies – for instance – did not apply. Rather workers were unfree, slaves to the owner’s of the farms where they toiled hard to grow cocoa to sate European tastes. 

It is estimated that up to 40,000 unfree workers toiled on the Portuguese island of São Tomé by 1900. Originally some of them, had been contract workers recruited after Portugal abolished slavery in 1875, however; they had not been allowed to leave the island or allowed to bargain for further payment once their contract was up, so had been forced into unfreedom to survive.

Cadbury’s began buying cocoa from São Tomé where this situation prevailed in 1886. It is known that if they were not aware of how the cocoa was being produced initially, then certainly by 1901 Cadbury family members who controlled the firm were aware that workers on  São Tomé were at least in some instances, unfree. 

To give the Cadbury’s a degree of credit, when this came to light they did make enquiries in Portugal, but accepted assurances from Portugal that a new labour statute would be enacted on the island and left it at that.

During 1905 and 1905 an investigative journalist Henry Nevinson filed a series of articles for Harper’s magazine detailing the shocking labour conditions in Portugal’s west African colonies including São Tomé. These were collated in 1906 into a book, accurately entitled given the revelations contained within, A Modern Slavery.

While the Cadbury’s initially attempted to damp down the claims by threatening legal action against publications which repeated them, after Britain’s Liberal Party government which the family was closely associated with instructed the Foreign Office to prepare a report, the Cadbury’s decided to launch their own investigation into their supply chain. To do this they sent Joseph Burtt, a fellow Quaker, albeit without previous connections to their company or the wider confectionery business, to conduct on the ground research.

A few months after Joseph Burtt’s report was made public by the company in late 1908, with public angst about the source of the company’s cocoa still palpable, Cadbury’s announced that they were boycotting São Tomé products in future and urged other confectioners to follow suit. Cadbury’s would instead source, as they still do to this day, their cocoa from Ghana. Here concerns rightly remained about labour practices and surfaced from time-to-time, but the issue was taken off the boil for the company, who went so far as to claim that they had always had the moral high ground.

In this way Bournville, which today is amongst the most affluent and desirable places to live in Birmingham, albeit with a substantial quantity of social housing still provided by Bournville Village Trust, can be seen as yet another product of imperialism and capitalism. Worth bearing in mind when you visit. And of course, right across the consumer goods industry not just chocolate, questions about the labour and other standards goods are produced with, especially where the extraction of raw materials and manufacture occurs outside the Global North, remain as pressing today as they were in the 1900s. 

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

This walk from central Birmingham to Bournville, primarily along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, begins from New Street Station’s Stephenson Street exit opposite the West Midlands Metro stop.

Having reached New Street’s Stephenson Street exit, turn left.

Walk along Stephenson Street heading for the A38 and the Mailbox shopping centre. This is near where Cadbury’s first city centre factory was prior to their move south to Bournville in 1879.

Upon reaching a raised section of the A38 keep walking straight ahead beneath the road.

On the far side of the road turn left walking towards the entrance of the Mailbox.

Climb the steps and enter the shopping centre.

Head of the Mailbox’s escalators, walking straight through the shopping centre.

At the back of the shopping centre you come out onto a terrace.

Here head left and follow the terrace around passing a series of bars and restaurants.

On the far side of the terrace beside the Cube tower block, turn right and head across a foot bridge spanning the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.

Upon reaching the base of the ramp of the bridge turn right, and double back upon yourself walking along the towpath to opposite the basin where the Cube and the back of the Mailbox stands.

The foundations and frame of what is now the Mailbox was constructed as Birmingham’s central Royal Mail sorting office in the early 1970s. The facility was operational for less than 30 years, shutting in 1998 to be transformed into the complex of flats, shops, restaurants, bars, hotels and offices which stands to this day. Prior to the Royal Mail sorting office being constructed the site was a railway goods station on the edge of the city centre which was intermodal, long before that was a term, with the canal network. Indeed – as Worcester Wharf – the depot had originally been constructed solely to serve the canal network. Canals ran deep into the city centre during the 19th Century. Today only the basin around which the back of the Mailbox sits is the sole remnant of this era of the site’s history.

Once opposite the Cube and the basin turn right. Begin walking along the canal towpath heading south towards Bournville. You stay on the canal pretty much all the way.

The stretch of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal heading south from Gas Street Basin in the city centre where the waterway begins and intersects with the Birmingham Canal Navigation heading north, was the first bit to be constructed in the 1790s.

You follow the waterway running close to the Cross-City Line south out through Five Ways. Then out into leafy Edgbaston.

Approaching the edge of the University of Birmingham’s extensive grounds which are bounded to the west by the canal you pass through the Edgbaston Tunnel which is pretty short, just 96 metres long.

Initial work to turn the towpath into a walking and cycling route linking south Birmingham with the city centre was conducted in the early 1990s around the time of the . The route was then steadily upgraded and eventually completely hard surfaced in the 2010s. It was then that the previously narrow, uneven footway through the tunnel was extensively widened.

A little way beyond the Edgbaston Tunnel you pass a canal winding hole just after a footbridge adjacent to the Vale site, where the majority of the University of Birmingham’s own student halls are located.

Now walking adjacent to the University’s Edgbaston campus you walk through a twisting wooded section of canal.

Before passing underneath a bridge on to a long straight section very close to the Cross-City Railway Line.

Beyond a further bridge you pass the campus of the University of Birmingham approaching the recently remodelled University Station which also serves the University Hospitals Birmingham complex on top of Metchley Ridge to your right.

Passing University Station you approach the edge of the University of Birmingham’s land heading for Selly Oak.

Soon you cross the Ariel Aqueduct (named for a historic bike manufacturer based in Bournbrook) which was constructed in 2011 for the new section of the A38 (called the Aston Webb Boulevard after the architect of the University of Birmingham’s bizarre byzantine looking early 20th Century hilltop precinct) entering Selly Oak.

Historically the Bourn Brook which runs through a culvert beneath the canal embankment was the boundary between Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Putting Selly Oak and every south of it that is now Birmingham, in a different county from the city’s historic core where you began the walk.

You approach the recently built retail park with a large Sainsbury’s and a towering, rather bleak stack of student bedrooms, which was until the late 1980s the site of the notorious Birmingham Battery works. It was from the wharf, recently re-cut by the redoubtable Lapal Canal Trust, that the ill fated southern section of the Dudley No. 2 Canal headed north and west towards the Black Country. A route now long lost, and unnavigable in its entirety since 1917 when the troublesome Lapal Tunnel beneath what is now Woodgate Valley Park closed for good.

Passing the retail park, you walk underneath the road carrying the old A38 through Selly Oak. Then continue along a long straight section approaching Bournville.

Along the way you pass beneath several bridges, eventually approaching a grey brick bridge in a deep cutting with red fire doors in it. Having passed beneath this bridge you are into Bournville.

Continue along the towpath passing beneath another bridge. This bridge is the former railway bridge which used to carry the Cadbury factory’s internal railway across the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. To your left on the far side of the canal is a modern housing estate constructed on the site of the former Cadbury Wharf where goods were transhipped by water into the 20th Century.

Passing this housing estate you are near the factory and Bournville Railway Station.

Just after the railway station platform shelters on the right there is a ramp running up and around onto Mary Vale Road. Walk up this ramp onto Mary Vale Road.

Once on Mary Vale Road turn right and walk a short distance towards a 1960s office black converted to flats.

Turn right and walk down this hill until you reach Bournville Lane at the bottom.

Once on Bournville Lane turn left and walk along the road past the factory. Along the way you pass the old Bournville factory women’s swimming baths as well as the entrance to the Lady’s Park on the opposite side of the road to the factory buildings. The swimming baths have been disused for decades.

Just after the factory complex there are some steps running off to the right onto Bournville Playing Field in front of the factory buildings.

Turn right down these steps and follow the path around the edge of the field and the front of the factory. You come to a ramp on your left which you walk down.

At the bottom of the ramp turn left and walk down a fenced in walkway around the edge of the factory. It is known as birdcage walk.

Presently next to a disused security lodge the path twists sharply to the right. Walk a little further along until you reach a road.

Here either turn right to reach Cadbury World.

Or walk straight across the road and then right to keep on along the path up to Bournville Green and the heart of the village.

Here straight ahead is the village green, while to the left there are the village shops, Carillon and Rest House in the centre of the green. While to the right stands Selly Manor, a Tudor era property with Medieval antecedents moved to the site from Bournbrook in the early 20th Century, along with the even older Minworth Greaves from north Birmingham. to preserve them.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

Bournville is served by the 27 bus (Northfield to Maypole via King’s Heath) and the 11 Outer Circle (at the time of writing in August 2023) and the 61 and 63 run along the nearby Bristol Road towards the southern edge of Birmingham via Northfield, and back into the city centre via Selly Oak and Edgbaston (at the time of writing in August 2023). The Cross City Line also had four trains per hour on weekdays and Saturdays and two per hour on Sundays (at the time of writing in August 2023) both north towards Sutton Coldfield and Lichfield via the city centre and south towards Redditch and Bromsgrove.