Book of the Week: Bournville

Jonathan Coe on how the village that stars in his new novel came to be

The air did not smell of chocolate, but chocolate was in the air. Nobody needed to put a name on the factory that stood at the heart of the village. They simply called it “the Works”. And inside this factory, they made chocolate. They had been making chocolate there for more than sixty years. John Cadbury had opened his first shop in the centre of Birmingham back in 1824, selling ground cocoa beans for hot drinking chocolate: a devout Quaker, like his brothers, he saw the drink not only as a nutritious component of breakfast, but as a healthy substitute for alcohol later in the day.

The business had grown steadily, the workforce had expanded, bigger premises had been acquired and then, in 1879, his sons decided to move production out of Birmingham altogether. The area they chose largely consisted, at the time, of sloping meadowland. Their vision: industry and nature existing in harmony, symbiotic, co-dependent.

At first the factory was small. A one-storey, red-bricked building, flooded with light on three sides by generous windows that allowed views onto the green spaces all around. Next to the factory were placed sports fields, gardens and a children’s playground. From here, the city centre seemed remote. This place called itself a village and it felt like a village. Workers had to travel from miles around, arriving at the railway station that in those days was still known as Stirchley Street.

This arrangement could not continue for long, given that by the end of the nineteenth century the number of people employed at the Works had risen from two hundred to more than two and a half thousand. In 1895 the company acquired more of the land surrounding the factory buildings, and soon the workers could enjoy further recreation grounds and a cricket pitch. But the Cadbury family’s ambitions went beyond that. They imagined houses: affordable houses, well-built houses, houses with deep gardens where trees could flourish and fruit and vegetables could be grown. Quakerism, as before, was at the heart of their project, and their goal was “the amelioration of the conditions of the working-class and labouring population in and around Birmingham by the provision of improved dwellings, with gardens and opened spaces to be enjoyed therewith”.

Whenever it was possible, they bought up more and more pockets of land in this swathe of countryside to the south of Birmingham, determined that less visionary, more profit-hungry developers should not get their hands on them. And in this way the village grew, reaching outwards, extending, putting out shoots, blossoming in plant-like formations until it covered hundreds of acres and consisted of more than two thousand houses, many but not all of them occupied by Cadbury workers, and although it was soon surrounded and hemmed in on all sides by other, more ordinary suburbs, by Stirchley and Cotteridge and Small Heath and King’s Heath and King’s Norton and West Heath and Northfield and Weoley Castle and Selly Oak, still this village never lost its character.

At its hub lay the village green. Close to the village green stood the junior school with its clock tower housing the famous carillon. Surrounding the school were Woodbrooke Road, Thorn Road and Linden Road, throughways which, however much traffic would fill them in the years to come, somehow always kept their sense of calm, a pastoral memory of shade and leafiness that was embedded in their very names.

What should it be called, this special place? You might have thought, for the people who named it, that with its almshouses and playing fields, its miniature boating lake and white-flanneled cricketers, the village was built as an archetype – a parody, almost – of a certain notion of Englishness. The little stream which wound through its very centre was called the Bourn, and many expected that Bournbrook would be the chosen name.

But this was a village founded on enterprise, and that enterprise was to sell chocolate, and even in the hearts of the Cadburys, these pioneers of British chocolate manufacture, there lurked a residual sense of the inferiority of the native product, compared to its Continental rivals. Was there not something quintessentially, intrinsically European about the finest chocolate? The beans themselves had always come from the far corners of the Empire, of course – nothing unBritish about that – but the means of turning them into edible chocolate had been invented by a Dutchman, and it was a truth universally acknowledged – if for ever unspoken – that it was the French, and the Belgians, and the Swiss, who had since brought the making of chocolate to a pitch of near-perfection. If Cadbury’s chocolate was ever truly to compete on this field, it would have to be branded in such a way that it trailed in its wake an overtone of European refinement, Continental sophistication.

So Bournbrook, they decided, would not quite do. A variation was chosen. Bournville. The name of a village not just founded upon, and devoted to, but actually dreamed into being by chocolate.

This extract is from Jonathan Coe’s new novel Bournville.

Jonathan is joining us on “A Drink with the Idler” at 6pm on Thursday 17 November. Book your tickets here. Free for subscribers.

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