There’s an excellent article about Bournville on the website for the American Magazine ‘The Atlantic’. It charts Bournville’s development as a Garden City and outlines how George Cadbury’s paternalistic attitudes still dominant in the Village today.

The article takes as its starting point the story of how a Birmingham conference for urban planners on the ‘City of the Future’ in 1901 looked to Bournville as an exemplar. The establishment of Bournville Village Trust is described as key moment when the Village became “more than a factory town.”

The article praises George Cadbury’s vision for the area but does counter that the area may not be to everyone’e taste:

“To some, Bournville will seem suffocating or even creepy, a real-life version of the heavily scrutinized ‘Village’ in the TV cult classic The Prisoner”

You can read the article in full here:
“The Evolution of England’s First Planned Community”

(Thanks to one of our readers, Lawrence Hurley, for spotting the article)