Dr Jacob Fredrickson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this, he was the Director of the Centre for Midlands History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham, and a research fellow working on new histories of utopian garden cities, with a focus on Bournville. His work has featured in Twentieth Century British History and Cultural and Social History, and his forthcoming first monograph, Crimes of Passion: Violence and the Making of Modern Love, will be published in 2026.
Who does Bournville ‘belong to’? In one telling of this story, the answer might be the Cadbury family, and particularly George and Richard Cadbury, the brothers who moved the Cadbury firm to the ‘factory in a garden’. Bournville promised a new vision for worker welfare, guided by the Cadbury’s Quaker faith and liberal politics. Certainly histories of Bournville can give this impression. Yet in this paper, Dr. Fredrickson will explore a period of Bournville’s history not usually included in the grand narratives of Cadbury’s philanthropy: the mid-twentieth century. It is a moment where, for the first time, Bournville Village Trust lose freehold autonomy over Bournville Village. This paper brings to life this rather choppy and contested moment in the trust’s history, where home-owners on the Bournville estate increasingly challenge the power and authority of the Cadbury family, particularly in their vision for the estate’s future home-building plans. In so doing, it explores how Bournville responded to the political, social, and economic co-ordinates of the mid-twentieth century: one very different to the late nineteenth century that spawned the original ‘utopia’.
