Westbourne Road Leisure Gardens (also known as Malthouse Meadows)

The following is from the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. For the most up-to-date Register entry, please visit the The National Heritage List for England (NHLE):

www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many of the larger industrial towns had sets of rented Town gardens, often forming a ring around the densely developed town centre. As the towns grew, so these garden sites were pushed ever further from the centre, only to be lost entirely as development continued. A national survey (Lambert, 1994) has indicated that very few of these sites survive either in their original form or, indeed, at all.

The Westbourne Road site as it exists today represents the core of a more extensive area of gardens, which retains the basic structure, if little of the finer details, of the mid-19th-century site. As shown on maps such as Samuel Bradford's of 1751, and Piggot Smith's of 1828, 18th-century Birmingham was surrounded by large numbers of town gardens laid out in blocks detached from any residences, which were available for rent. John Claudius Loudon commented, in 1831, that there were upwards of two thousand such gardens round the City, laid out on sites divided by hedges, and rented out, for annual sums of between 17/6 and 30/-, mainly to members of the skilled working-class. The gardens, generally provided with a brick or wooden summerhouse, were used for the growing of a wide range of plants, both functional and ornamental – Loudon registered astonishment at the variety of hardy shrubs found on one plot ( The Gardener's Magazine', 1831) - and likewise were laid out for pleasure as well as practical purpose. The sale prices for the gardens (that is, the buildings, plants and the right of possession) varied according to content of the garden in question, Loudon citing the average as being around 20 guineas, but noting that prices could reach up to 60 guineas. By the 1870s, the increasing suburbs of Birmingham were already supplanting such garden plots. J T Bunce in his history of the corporation, 1878, remarks that very few are now to be found, the principal group remaining being in Westbourne Road and Chad Valley in Edgbaston: all the rest have been swept away by the extension of the town, and even those just mentioned appear to be doomed to the same fate, as the surrounding land is being rapidly cut up for suburban villas' (p. 310).

In 1717, the manor of Edgbaston was purchased by Sir Richard Gough, merchant, who rebuilt the Hall and created a park; his grandson, Henry (died 1798), was raised to the peerage as Baron Calthorpe, in 1796. In 1784, the family moved away but continued to accrue land around Edgbaston such that by the late 1820s the estate comprised 85% of the parish. Henry's grandson, George, 3rd Lord Calthorpe (died 1851), inherited on the death of his father in 1807, and it was he who was responsible for most of the activity in the period 1843-80 which saw the Calthorpes embarking on redevelopment of their agricultural landholdings as a predominantly middle-class suburb which offered a significant number of houses for the wealthier artisan. This,along with a demand from the workers employed in manufacture and in shops closer in to Birmingham (Rawlinson, 1849), created a demand for gardens to rent and by the middle of the century there were over 250 such gardens, most of one sixteenth to one eighth of an acre, those of the Westbourne Road site being generally one eighth of an acre.

Historic maps (1827 Tithe, surveyed 1820; 1843 parish map; around 1843 parish survey) show that formerly the Westbourne Road Gardens area had been a series of fields in use as a mix of arable and meadow. In 1844, the Botanical Gardens were, for financial reasons, obliged to surrender back to the Calthorpe Estate the lease on six acres of the lower part of its plot. Rather than be developed as housing, possibly for philanthropic reasons, this land was laid out by the 3rd Lord Calthorpe as a set of gardens lying to either side of a track from the Westbourne Road south to the Chad Brook (see Piggot-Smith, map c.1852). By 1855, these had been extended across the meadowland to either side of the Brook, south-eastwards to the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.In 1876, the Birmingham and West Suburban Railway Company, as part of the Midland Company, opened the single-track line from Granville Street to King's Norton, this running to the south of the garden area; the Ordnance Survey 1st edition at 25 inches to one mile, 1887, shows the site at this time, stretching south from the Westbourne Road to the railway line. A licence to double the tracks meant that in the early 1880s these cut through the southern end of the site resulting in the loss of ten plots.

In the 1950s, Edgbaston Girls School was granted the lease on land, including over thirty gardens, to the west of the access from Westbourne Road, and this area was converted to playing fields. East of this, 17 gardens abutting the Botanical Gardens were lost to expansion of the Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Club in the inter-war period. In the early 1960s, the Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society (BBHS) acquired the leases of the 20 gardens on the eastern boundary of the site, six of these being cleared and remodelled by the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of their Gardening Club series, the Programme continuing to occupy them until 1968. This area subsequently became neglected, all of the buildings and hard landscaping together with most of the fruit trees and hedges, having been removed. In 1964, the City Council took on the lease of those gardens which then remained, the lease running until the year 2002; all of these plots continue in use as gardens, bar one (number 127) currently (1997), unusable due to tipping by the Council, and five (numbers 65-67, 131, 132) which were occupied by the Urban Wildlife Trust and used as a tree nursery and plant centre, the Trust departing leaving unsold trees and having used the topsoil for use as potting compost.

In 1972 and onwards through the 1970s, the Council carried out a programme of demolition of the buildings on the plots, with accompanying loss of some of the hedging to give access to the plant and lorries required for the work. Thus while the basic structure of the remaining core of the gardens is intact, much of the detail has been lost.

Type

Allotment

Purpose

Food / Drink Production

Period

Victorian (1837-1901)

Survival

Part: standing remains

Open to the public

Yes

Electoral Ward

Edgbaston