If you go exploring around the Bournville area in the grounds near the old Cadbury Club, you find an old remnants of George Cadbury’s original village design. It’s an old lily pool situated at the far end of the old Girls’ Recreation Ground off Bournville Lane.
It was originally a quite retreat for female employees at Cadbury’s, framed by the rural landscape of the early 1900s.
Near to the pool you can also see traces of a walled-garden, which gives the sense that the area was once the grounds of a grand house. This house was an eighteenth-century villa, sometimes called Bournbrook Hall, at other times Bournbrook House, and then again Barnbrook. The park around the pool was once its grounds, and the pool itself was its cellar.
The house was still standing when the Cadbury’s arrived, and can be seen in early photographs, where it was situated on Bournville Lane, facing the men’s sports grounds (see below).
Above: Men’s sports grounds, Pavilion club house, and Bournbrook Hall to the rear on the right, 1902. The house had been demolished by 1910.
The Cadbury’s bought the Bournbrook Hall estate in 1895, which included lands which later became both the ‘mens” and ‘girls” grounds. The walled-garden which survives was the kitchen garden, and the premises also had stables, which are still standing, and Grade II listed, although getting little care and attention at present. The map (below) shows the area in the 1880s, just as Cadbury’s was moving in.
In the early years of the 1900s, the hall was used as a hostel for girls (below).
