B1 Reading Skills

If you love chocolate, maybe you have eaten a bar of Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate. But Bournville isn’t just the name of an English chocolate bar. It’s the name of a village which was built especially for workers at the Cadbury’s chocolate factory. George and Richard Cadbury took over the cocoa and chocolate business from their father in 1861. A few years later, they decided to move the factory out of the centre of Birmingham, a city in the middle of England, to a new location where they could expand. They chose an area close to the railways and canals so that they could receive milk deliveries easily and send the finished products to stores across the country.

Here, the air was much cleaner than in the city centre, and the Cadbury brothers thought it would be a much healthier place for their employees to work. They named the site Bournville after a local river called ‘The Bourn’. ‘Ville’, the French word for town, was used because at the time, people thought French chocolate was the highest quality. The new factory opened in 1879. Close to it, they built a village where the factory workers could live. By 1900, there were 313 houses on the site, and many more were built later.

The Cadbury family were religious and believed that it was right to help other people. They thought their workers deserved to live and work in good conditions. In the factory, workers were given a fair wage, a pension and access to medical treatment. The village was also designed to provide the best possible conditions for workers too. The houses, although traditional in style, had modern interiors, indoor bathrooms and large gardens. The village provided everything that workers needed including a shop, a school and a community centre where evening classes were held to train young members of the workforce.

Since the Cadbury family believed that their workers and their families should be fit and healthy, they added a park with hockey and football pitches, a running track, bowling green, fishing lake, and an outdoor swimming pool. A large clubhouse was built in the park so that players could change their clothes and relax after a game. Dances and dinners were also held here for the factory workers, who were never charged to use any of the sports facilities. However, because the Cadbury’s believed that alcohol was bad for health and society, no pubs were ever built in Bourneville!

The Cadbury brothers were among the first business owners to ensure that their workers had good standards of living. Soon, other British factory owners were copying their ideas by providing homes and communities for their workers designed with convenience and health in mind. Today, over 25,000 people live in Bournville village. There are several facilities there to help people with special needs, such as care homes for the elderly, a hostel for people with learning difficulties and affordable homes for first-time homeowners and single people. Over a hundred years since the first house in Bournville Village was built, the aims of its founders are still carried out.