I'm Dr. Onyeka Nubia and I'm a historian, and I'm walking through Britain to reveal a fascinating period in our history.

The Victorians shaped modern Britain.

I'm searching for the innovation, the technology, and the industry that the Victorians gave us... (Dr. McWilliams) It's the oldest working engine in the world.

It's really a jewel in our collection.

(Dr. Nubia) ...for good and for bad.

(man) If you get your finger caught in the belt, you get the fingers off.

(Dr. Nubia) I'm going to explore this era that is as complicated as it is fascinating.

(atmospheric music) (peppy music) This time I'm in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of the Midlands.

It's like poetry, mechanical poetry.

During the Victorian age this place became known as the city of a thousand trades.

Wow.

With great steam engines and highly prized jewelry.

(Kate) Brooches were particularly popular during Victoria's reign.

She wore them herself.

(Dr. Nubia) The Victorians made Birmingham a modern city through developments in transport... (Carl) It's got the biggest glass roof -of any station in the world.

-Wow.

...and establishing great institutions.

I've never seen an edifice like this on any learning institution in any country in the world.

Birmingham was a Victorian powerhouse whose influence was felt throughout the world.

♪ (contemplative music) Before Queen Victoria came to the throne, Birmingham was described as Britain's first manufacturing town.

♪ In terms of industry and growth, it led where other cities and towns would follow.

So here, here is where my journey begins, on these canals.

And it may not seem like an iconic Victorian setting, and yet these canals are the reason why Birmingham's industrial change took place during the Victorian period.

And we're going to find out why that was.

♪ But here in the heart of Birmingham is New Street Station.

Today, it is a busy modern station with over 40 million passengers a year, and it seems to be the perfect example of Victorian ingenuity.

♪ This station is a statement of Birmingham's position inside Britain.

In the Victorian Period, Birmingham was one of the first cities to build a large station, and we're gonna find out why and how that happened.

On this walk I will see how Birmingham became modern, how canals kick-started this and the railways followed, where steam engines were built, how the city's famous Jewellery Quarter came to be.

I'll see the slum housing of early Victorian times, meet the man who sought to sweep them all away... ♪ ...and end with the model village of Bournville, funded by chocolate and shaped by religious ideas.

But my journey starts here in the very center, New Street Station.

After eight years of construction, the nine-platform station officially opened in 1854.

The moment had arrived for Birmingham to prove itself to the world as a city at the heart of the country.

This was the city's grandest example of Victorian architecture, and it's where I'm meeting Professor Carl Chinn.

♪ So, Carl, we're right in front of Birmingham New Street Station.

It's a great station, but it's nothing like how it was in the Victorian period.

(Carl) No, in the 1850s it was grandiose, it was a huge structure, and it was shouted out to the world that Birmingham was on the cusp of becoming an international city.

And it's got the--supposedly, the biggest glass roof of any station in the world.

-Wow.

-120,000 feet of glass, over 1,000 feet long, a 212-foot span.

(ambient music) (Dr. Nubia) New Street helped Birmingham forge its reputation as Britain's second city.

Birmingham was meant to be the example of progress, but how it got there is an intriguing story.

♪ (Carl) Birmingham began in the 12th century -as a market town.

-Yes.

(Carl) But was really important from an early date as a metalworking center.

-Yes.

-It made swords for the Parliamentarians in the Civil War.

It overcame its location in the middle of England by first of all making small metal goods that could be transported easily on wagons, -carts, and packhorses.

-Right, yes.

(Carl) So Birmingham became the great toy shop of Europe.

-Yeah.

-Small metal goods, buttons, buckles, coins, all these kind of things.

-Pen nibs.

-Pen nibs.

(Dr. Nubia) Yeah.

This is because Birmingham is not a port city.

Transport has always been key to its success.

Before the railways there were the roads, and more importantly the first great network, the canals.

So where are we, Carl?

(Carl) This is Gas Street Basin.

This is the hub of Birmingham's canal network, and this is where the canals brought Birmingham out to the world.

(Dr. Nubia) Fantastic.

(Carl) That's the Worcester Canal, joining Birmingham to the southwest onto Bristol.

-Right, fantastic, -Okay, but this one... -Yes.

-...connects Birmingham -with the Black Country.

-Right.

(Carl) Now the Black Country are the towns of West Bromwich.

-Yeah, okay, right, I see.

-Dudley, Tipton, Wednesbury, where Birmingham gets its coal and iron all from.

-When it opens... -Yes.

(Carl) ...the price of coal drops by almost half.

-Wow.

-Can you imagine the invigorating effect that has on your industries.

Birmingham's drawn in the raw materials.

-Yes.

-But now through connecting to Wolverhampton, and from Wolverhampton you can get up to -Liverpool and elsewhere.

-Yes.

(Carl) Through the Worcester Canal you can get to Worcester in the southwest.

Birmingham now is reaching the ports of England -more easily.

-Right.

-And this occurs...?

-This occurs from the late 18th century onwards.

Birmingham becomes the center of trade industry -before the Victorian period.

-Yes.

But the Victorian industrialists are able to utilize that trade and industry because it's already built on a foundation.

(Carl) Yeah, it's got a solid foundation that's been growing from the later Middle Ages through the early modern period.

-Right.

-Birmingham is ready for takeoff from the late to 17th, early 18th centuries.

-Takeoff is the canals.

-Yeah, of course.

(Carl) It accelerates Birmingham's growth.

(peppy music) (Dr. Nubia) Right alongside these canals grew one of Birmingham's most important industries: The manufacture of steam engines.

I'm walking a mile east to the award-winning Thinktank Museum.

I'm really quite excited because I'm about to see one of the largest steam engine collections in the world.

The museum first opened in 2001.

Today it houses over 200 exhibits.

(steam hissing) Wow, it's like I'm walking into the Industrial Revolution.

Birmingham's proud history of steam engines was started by a famous pair of engineers, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, working out of their factory on the banks of the Birmingham Canal from 1795.

(Dr. McWilliams) Birmingham in the early Industrial Revolution was--was really the hub of steam engine manufacture.

It was where Boulton and Watt set up their engineering partnership.

And just a couple of years later, in the late 1770s, the Birmingham Canal Company ordered two engines from Boulton and Watt, and one of them we have in the museum here, the Smethwick Engine, and it's the oldest working engine in the world, so it's really a jewel in our collection.

(Dr. Nubia) Boulton and Watts's big idea was to use the expansive forces of steam and a vacuum simultaneously to produce a machine capable of pumping large amounts of canal water.

(Dr. McWilliams) The situation prior to this engine was that water was brought from surrounding natural sources to try and top up the locks, and they just couldn't do it at a fast enough rate.

This engine, in comparison, could lift 1,500 buckets of water every single minute.

You could get more boats into the city and more goods out of the city.

(contemplative music) The Smethwick Engine was really important for Birmingham.

It was a canal-pumping engine and what it solved was a capacity issue for the canal network.

If you need boats coming in and out of Birmingham, bringing in raw materials, and taking goods out, the more boats you can get in every day the better.

(Dr. Nubia) When it arrived the Smethwick Engine had a huge impact far beyond the West Midlands.

Across the country its cost and efficiency saw the design replace pumping engines, and the success of Boulton and Watt encouraged other engineering firms to set up alongside them in Birmingham.

(Dr. McWilliams) The thing that's really interesting to me about this engine in particular is what it represents for mechanization in Birmingham.

It was really revolutionary, it was an incredible idea and it made the canal more efficient.

But the canal network was a horse-powered network.

Boats that were passing through the canal were towed by horses.

So it didn't sweep away all the preexisting technologies, it worked with them.

(Dr. Nubia) The Smethwick Engine, much like the Industrial Revolution itself, owes its success to the ideas and inventions that came before.

The industrialists here used the technology from the 18th century to power the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, and this Smethwick Engine illustrates that more than any other machine that's here.

The impact of the engines produced here was soon felt across the country.

Senior technician Ian Collie is keen to show us why these machines were so successful.

This one worked on the Old Kent Road in London for more than 50 years.

(Ian) It was used for pumping gas... -Right.

-...when the-- all the streetlights had gas lights rather than the electric lights.

(Dr. Nubia) Right, yes, that-- that's fascinating.

And could you show us how it works?

-I can, yes.

-Yeah.

(Ian) We can warm it up for a little bit.

-Okay.

-We got to oil it up, then we can start it, so we can do that, yes.

(Dr. Nubia) That would be fantastic.

This machine is almost 160 years old.

You can see with this machine a combination of different trades coming together as one.

You got the metalworking trade.

You've got carpentry.

It is the accumulation of these different trades that enabled this technology to exist.

Okay, Ian, I think he's just about to get the gas-pumping engine going.

Can you tell us what you're doing, Ian?

(Ian) We're opening the main steam valve.

Now the engine's feel really warmed up.

I'm happy with the temperatures.

It's oiled up.

Opening the main steam valve and it should start running.

What I was thinking that there can't be many people who actually know how to operate these kinds of machines.

(Ian) Not nowadays.

(Dr. Nubia) And you might be one of the few.

(Ian) One of the few.

(Dr. Nubia) The engine weighs in at an astonishing 10 tons, while its towering wheel has a diameter of 18 feet, generating an incredible 60 horsepower of energy.

Wow, look--look at this.

Wow.

This is absolutely fascinating, and it's hypnotic.

(pensive music) It--it's like poetry, mechanical poetry.

♪ (adventurous music) Today I'm on a walk through Victorian Birmingham, exploring the center of Britain's metal manufacturing industries.

♪ Engineering and metalwork have defined centuries of history here.

So I'm heading northwest of the modern city to an area that became famous for a very different kind of metalworking.

♪ I'm meeting Heritage Activities Manager Kate O'Connor in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.

Queen Victoria herself popularized the wearing of jewelry.

-Okay.

-Brooches were particularly popular during Victoria's reign.

She wore them herself.

(contemplative music) (Dr. Nubia) During her reign the Queen also started the most extraordinary fashion trend.

Following Prince Albert's death, she decided to keep a lock of his hair.

♪ And so the locket became a necessary fashion accessory for the Victorians.

♪ (Kate) The trade got much more specialized during this period.

So for example, if you think of an engagement ring, you'd have a ring maker, you'd have a stone setter.

-I see.

-And that's why it was important that all of the firms were close together, and you see this huge concentration -in this area.

-Wow.

(Kate) So by 1850, it's estimated that almost half of the gold and silverware sold in London was produced here in Birmingham in the Jewellery Quarter.

(Dr. Nubia) Okay, that's a very interesting figure.

These changes in fashion, are they linked to the Industrial Revolution?

(Kate) Well, there were some new developments that enabled the mass production of jewelry.

So for example, electroplating.

-Okay, what's that?

-Okay, so that's the coating of a cheap base metal with an expensive metal, such as silver.

-Ah.

-So it just made jewelry much more affordable.

(whimsical music) (Dr. Nubia) This part of town began as a wealthy residential area away from the heavy industry of the city center, but over time artisans set up workshops here, catering for those who could afford their goods.

It was very much dictated by what was in fashion.

You see other items, like buttons, badges, medals, as well as bigger items, like trophies, and also coffin fixtures.

-Right.

-That was a huge business here in this area.

(Dr. Nubia) By the end of the Victorian age, Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter employed around 30,000 people.

To get a small taste of what working here in the 19th century would've been like, I'm going to step back in time.

♪ Nestled in the heart of the quarter is the Smith and Pepper Factory.

For more than 80 years it produced jewelry and other small decorative items.

(solemn music) ♪ Wow.

So it's like stepping back in time, with the exception of the electric lights, into a very late Victorian workshop.

♪ Looks like they used every available space to squeeze as many work people in as possible.

So some would be working here.

♪ 20, 30, 50, 50 people in one small space, or perhaps even more than 50.

From its 12-seated jeweler's bench to its engraving machines, the factory represents the heyday of the Jewellery Quarter.

Going into this back room.

This looks like the room where the money and the accounts and the books were kept, perhaps where a clerk or a manager would sit.

♪ Yeah, and you can actually watch what everybody's doing because I can even see the coins on the table at the far end of the room.

So the idea would be that you'd be keeping an eye on everybody working here.

Men, women, and even children as young as 8 years old worked long hours for very low pay.

Children were sent to work simply to earn money.

This was what families lived by, work or want.

If you didn't work, you didn't earn.

If you didn't earn, you couldn't eat, you couldn't pay your rent.

Very long hours, unsanitary conditions, dangerous conditions, people losing limbs.

(Dr. Nubia) It looks like most of these stools are made for adults, but this one looks like it's a child's stool and I think it may be a stool to stand on rather than sit.

It's a simple but telling insight into the harsh realities of workshop life in the 19th century.

From 1878 onwards things did improve a little.

The Factory Act prohibited anyone under the age of 10 from being employed.

It looks that all I'd have to do is just flick a switch and everything would begin again, the machines would start rolling, the lights would all come on, and perhaps, perhaps, the workers would appear and start working.

♪ (whimsical music) Before I leave the Jewellery Quarter, there's one more factory I have to visit.

This is the Birmingham Pen Museum and it's located inside the old Albert Works building.

The pen industry was at the heart of the city's progress, and more than 100 steel pen factories were located here.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hello, Larry.

-Yes.

I'm meeting Larry Hanks to understand more.

-Can I come in?

-Yes, 'course you can.

(Dr. Nubia) Great, wow.

-So this was a factory floor?

-Yeah, this was built in 1963, this one, this building.

It was a three-story building and it was steam-operated machinery.

(Dr. Nubia) Fantastic.

Literacy rates rose dramatically during the early 19th century.

So, too, did a demand for improved writing implements.

The feather quill was a popular writing implement, but it needed constant sharpening.

The new metal nibbed pens did not.

♪ They became an international success.

♪ Can you give us a scale of the pen-making industry in the Victorian period?

(Larry) By the 1870s, you could find-- If there was a group of four people writing with steel pens anywhere in the world, three out of that four of those pens would've been made in Birmingham.

It was a very big business for 150 years.

(Dr. Nubia) This is fantastic, there's so many pens here.

But what's the importance of the pen to the Victorian society.

(Larry) The main thing was the steel pen, that it brought writing to the masses.

-Right.

-Before the steel pen, everybody was using the quill, only it needed sharpening.

It was like a pencil, it wore out very quickly.

-I see.

-After you'd written a couple of lines, you had to start putting a new point on it.

The only thing you had to do with a steel pen was after you'd finish writing with it, was to wipe the surplus ink off it.

(Dr. Nubia) In factories such as this, the Victorians turned pen manufacture into a successful modern industry.

Pens were produced in vast numbers.

(Larry) You started with the steel.

It was put through a set of rollers.

-Oh, I see.

-You see, they put it backwards and forwards until it was rolled to this-- this thickness that they wanted.

Once you got the strip, the first operation then was blanking.

(clanking) -Ah, fantastic.

-And that's a blank.

-Okay.

-This used to be a shape.

(Dr. Nubia) This step-by-step factory process could see up to 18,000 pen nibs produced in a single day.

-So that put a hole in it.

-Right.

(Larry) The pens then come here for marking where we're gonna put the name of the pen on, and we give this a good swing.

And then you came here then for raising.

Now with raising you put that in there (clinking) Give that a tug.

And then if you look at it now, it starts to look like a pen nib.

-Yeah.

-The next operation is slitting.

(Dr. Nubia) And slitting means putting a slit in the nib?

-Yeah.

-So that you can write with it.

This looks like quite a skilled activity.

(Larry) The skill is making the tools.

The operator, it was just the speed they did it.

I mean, 'cause if you were doing 18,000 in an 8-hour day, you know you're doing it once every second and some of them once every two seconds.

-You know.

-You get into a pattern.

(Larry) And if you weren't doing your lot at the end of the day-- When you started at a place they'd give you a week to get up to speed, and if you weren't doing the amount that you should've been doing at the end of the week, you were out the door looking for another job.

(Dr. Nubia) I see.

A defining part of the Victorian pen industry was the number of women working in it.

(solemn music) This meant that women sometimes sought employment in factories just like this.

♪ Were these women being exploited in this work?

(Larry) In some ways yes, but I mean to say as far as they were concerned it was a poor area.

People wanted money.

With that bit of extra money that the women got, that mostly meant you eat every night of the week.

By the 1880s, the fountain pen came out, which had got a cartridge in that held ink to supply the nib.

(Dr. Nubia) Is that the industry that put the end to this industry?

(Larry) No, it was the biro.

We could live with the fountain pen, but with the biro itself it was nothing to do with the pen trade.

It was like I said, the only steel bit on it was the ball at the end.

(Dr. Nubia) In the 20th century with the arrival of the biro, Birmingham's once great pen industry dwindled.

From over 100 different producers, there are now just two.

(dramatic music) With the dawn of the Victorian age Birmingham's industries had exploded into life.

This boom meant that people came to Birmingham from local villages desperate for work.

In just 50 years Birmingham's population tripled.

♪ People came here looking for work, but there weren't enough houses.

There had to be a solution.

During the Victorian period back-to-back houses were thought of as the solution to Birmingham's housing problem.

♪ At the southern edge of the city thousands of two- and three-story houses just like this sprang up.

The National Trust has now fully restored some of them.

♪ So we can see here that there were 11 houses.

So there would've been 11 families in these houses with over 60 people.

(Dr. Nubia) The idea of back-to-backs originated in Leeds late in the 18th century.

Birmingham soon followed, and the hastily constructed properties soon popped up all over the city.

The reason that they became so popular was that they were incredibly cheap to build.

Contractors did not even need to put in any drainage systems, 'cause there's evidence that some of the back-to-back houses were actually built on open drains that were only covered by boards.

(Dr. Nubia) The design of the back-to-back houses were meant for a different time, not the Victorian period.

(pensive music) ♪ (Dr. Akhtar) So if we come into this house, in 1851, a woman named Sophia Hudson lived in this property with her five children.

This was her workshop, this was her living room, this was her kitchen, and you know, essential general play area for the children.

(Dr. Nubia) In the Victorian period, these houses became overcrowded and unpleasant.

Heat, for instance, came via chimney stack shared with your neighbors.

To make money, sometimes families rented out rooms to lodgers.

(Dr. Akhtar) So these beds would've been occupied by two--two lodgers and they would've slept on either side, separated by this curtain.

So the beds sometimes were shared between-- between lodgers, so day workers would sleep here in the night and night workers would sleep her in the day, and I guess you can decide for yourselves whether the sheets were changed in between each occupancy.

(Dr. Nubia) Even outside up to 60 families would've occupied the same yard space, a space that included an outdoor privy.

Family members would have to walk through mud to reach this toilet.

(Dr. Akhtar) Very minimal in terms of what we find here.

There's a--there's a bucket, no access to water, and the duty or the responsibility of emptying this bucket was the eldest daughter in the family, and she would've taken the bucket, carried it with all of its contents, and emptied it out into this miskin here.

So with over 60 families, it is not unlikely that this miskin would not have overrun, and so when it did, as it often did, the open sewage would've just run across the yard.

(somber music) (Carl) They're living with environmental pollution that is damaging their health and they're living with unsanitary conditions so that diseases spread because they haven't got fresh water, no proper drains, there's no proper sewage system.

Life was very hard for the working class.

(Dr. Woolf) You had people living in unsanitary conditions.

Pits for excrement that were left open.

Some would sort of seep into people's living rooms.

I mean, it was a really dark, degrading experience and environment if you were at the lower end of the social hierarchy.

The way the Victorians treated their poorer classes was to consider them as other.

They were a race apart, completely separate from the majority of Victorian Britain, and one of the key kind of tenets, if you like, in Victorian thinking was that, "You were poor because you deserved it, it was your fault, it was your fault you were in poverty."

Back-to-back houses were not the solution.

The people that lived there lived in terrible conditions.

They became slums and eventually they became a blight upon Victorian society, an embarrassment.

(grim music) The Public Health Act of 1875 made it illegal to build such properties, but by the end of the Victorian age, there were still over 40,000 of them in Birmingham.

However, the 1870s was a key time in the city's development.

One man from Camberwell in London was to leave his mark on many parts of Birmingham.

The key turning point is 1873 when Birmingham elects a new mayor, a liberal mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, and he embarks on this massive modernization program.

(contemplative music) (Dr. Nubia) I'm now walking two miles west to one of Chamberlain's biggest legacies: Birmingham University.

♪ Wow, look at that.

♪ Who would build a tower like that?

I've never seen an edifice like this on any learning institution in any country in the world that I've been to, never.

At 100 meters, this is the tallest freestanding clock tower in the world.

The Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower commemorates a man who started out manufacturing as an industrialist.

But he went on to serve three terms as mayor before establishing this university at the very end of the Victorian period.

It's where I'm meeting Dr. Matt Cole.

(Dr. Cole) Joseph Chamberlain is the towering figure of 19th century Birmingham.

He's characteristic both of the city and of the Victorian era.

He was an industrial entrepreneur and he was also a radical, he was a reformer.

He wanted to improve living conditions, to improve the education of children in Birmingham.

People were kept in such terrible conditions and forced to work, you know, for a pittance, and Joseph Chamberlain didn't like it.

-Yes.

-Is his not liking of it for religious reasons, or is it pragmatic industrial ones?

(Dr. Cole) Well, it was a mixture of the two, but he was really also aware of the threat of what would happen -if there wasn't reform.

-Right.

(Dr. Cole) He called his proposed reforms "ransom."

He said to which people, "What ransom are you prepared to pay to prevent a revolution?"

(Dr. Nubia) A revolution, right.

What did Joseph Chamberlain actually do for Birmingham?

He introduced free schools to the--to the city, uh, well, along with the 1870 Education Act.

He also improved living conditions in one sense by being the first Birmingham leader to sweep away slums in the central area of the city, create new streets and corporation streets, which he knew would fill with shops and businesses that would pay rates that would pay for the program of social justice he had established.

(Dr. Nubia) Beyond housing, this was the time when Birmingham was becoming more than just the workshop of the world.

It was developing its own culture.

(Dr. Cole) The aim was to establish the image of Birmingham as being modern, glamorous, high powered, prosperous.

To say to people who didn't know what Birmingham was about, "This the kind of thing we do.

-We're a city of culture."

-Yeah.

(Dr. Cole) "We're a city of business.

We're a city with a sense of history."

Was Joseph Chamberlain a politician of big ideas?

(Dr. Cole) Yes, Chamberlain was a politician of enormous vision, and the distinctive approach he has you can see in the university around us here.

-Right.

-Not only did this university offer a different curriculum based on preparing people for work, with departments for brewing funded by the local brewers, accountancy supported by the local accountants association.

-Yes.

-A medical school incorporated into the university.

-Yes.

-But it recruited from its own area as well.

(Dr. Nubia) Right, local people.

So in other words, local people felt that that university was their university?

-That's quite unusual.

-Very much so and very early on.

And it recruited from all sorts of local people.

Women and men were allowed to graduate on equal terms, which was relatively unusual at the time.

-Yeah, revolutionary, that is.

-People from all social classes -came to the university.

-And then there's this tower, um, that looks like it could be in 3rd century Alexandria.

It's absolutely enormous.

(Dr. Cole) Yes, Chamberlain was enormously concerned to create the right physical environment.

He wanted this to be like American universities, which he'd--which he'd conducted studies of... -I see.

-...to offer that openness, to give a sense of identity.

The tower itself copies one in Sienna, but it also tells you something about Joseph Chamberlain, because most of the other founders of the university didn't want the tower.

They thought building it for 50,000 pounds, which in those days was a lot of money, and which had to be found from a special donation, uh, was a waste of money.

But Chamberlain said to the first principal of the university, Oliver Lodge, "We should have this tower, because you're worried about 50,000 pounds.

Give people something to see.

Let them know that we're here and you'll have half a million in no time."

(Dr. Nubia) I see, yeah, it's big ideas, isn't it?

Yeah.

There is no doubt that Joseph Chamberlain was an influential figure in late Victorian society, but his legacy for me is far more complex.

As the Victorian age ended, Chamberlain was Secretary of State for the colonies, pressing Britain's power and interest overseas, in particular in the continent of Africa.

He's quoted as saying, "The British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen."

I still feel challenged by Chamberlain's legacy.

I feel challenged by Chamberlain's legacy in West Africa in actions of mass killing and mass destruction, and I feel also challenged by the way in which sometimes we look at Victorian period with I think a degree of rose-tinted spectacles.

(Dr. Cole) It's no surprise that, looking back at the legacy of Joseph Chamberlain as Colonial Secretary, many people are reminded of quite how brutal a method sometimes used to maintain the British Empire were.

He was Colonial Secretary during the Boer War.

He fought the Dutch farmers, the Africanas, for the right to control African territory.

None of that is anything that most people would-- would empathize with today.

-Mm.

-And indeed although there are a number of memorials to Chamberlain, there are no--very few statues.

Uh, and I don't he would've liked the idea of himself as an individual being remembered as ideal.

(peppy music) (Dr. Nubia) From the earliest industrial times, Birmingham led the way, establishing itself as the workshop of the world.

But it was the Victorians who turned this ever-growing workshop into a fully functioning city.

♪ Everywhere I walk in Victorian Birmingham I cannot help but see and feel the suffering of the ordinary people that helped make this city great.

So I'm ending my walk with something rather different.

I'm heading south to Bournville, which in the 1890s took a whole new approach to the challenges and inequalities of city growth.

As one enters this quiet suburban street, one is confronted by different architectural styles.

On the left here we have these old Tudor buildings.

On the right, these 19th century, early 20th century buildings.

It's like they've all been thrown together.

Somebody's trying to make a statement.

Somebody's trying to say something about Victorian society.

Somebody was actually two people: George and Richard Cadbury, who 30 years earlier had taken over their father's small chocolate business in the center of Birmingham.

Like so many Victorian industrialists, they needed more space.

(Dr. Woolf) The great Cadbury brothers decided that a brighter future, a more optimistic future, could be realized by philanthropists and industrialists like themselves.

So what they did was when they wanted to expand their factory, they bought a plot of land just outside Birmingham and it became known as "the factory in a garden."

It was a factory, beautiful fields, and surrounding the factory were these lovely built, affordable houses, cottages with gardens, and it was kind of seen as a model village.

(Dr. Nubia) In the heart of that village, I'm meeting Heritage Manager Daniel Callicott.

(Daniel) So this stingy entrance to Bournville Park.

-Right.

-But perhaps most noteworthy because if you just look in the center of the park, there's a little stream, that's-- that's the Bourn Brook itself where this area is named after, and the Cadburys changed the name to be more French sounding.

French and Belgium chocolate was the best you could buy at the time, so Bourn Brook was a bit plain, but Bournville was a great marketing tool and perhaps maybe made their chocolates be a bit even more tempting.

(Dr. Nubia) Yes, but we're not in France, are we?

(Daniel) We're not in France, we're in Birmingham.

(Dr. Nubia) To this day Bournville is touted as one of the most desirable places to live in the West Midlands.

It was created to be just that, hence the ancient properties that were moved here to make this place idyllic.

(cheerful music) (Daniel) So these buildings were almost certainly due for demolition, and property developers that were buying up all of the agricultural land at the time were clearing it.

-I see.

-George Cadbury heard about this and bought the building, then came up with the scheme to have it moved bit by bit... -Really?

-...into his village -of Bournville.

-I did notice that each of the buildings are different... -Yes.

-...from each other.

-Absolutely.

-So that each person feels that they have their own space that is unique to themselves, and that is a million miles away from a back-to-back house.

(Daniel) It is, they say there's no two properties the same in Bournville, as they would-- might have a standard plan, then they would start to add architectural devices to try and create this feel that Bournville had grown up gradually over time... -Right.

-...and through time you have different architectural influences and styles and so on to give it that village feel.

(Dr. Nubia) Significantly, the properties here were much larger than the back-to-backs in the city center.

(Daniel) So we got our parlor, our living room.

There was no bathroom, but they did sink a bath in the kitchen floor in some properties, which is cool, isn't it?

And then the windows here, substantial numbers of them as well as the size of them to provide lots of light.

You see that--the-- these long, enormous gardens butting against each other with the row of fruit trees at the ends, and then they each had vegetable patches -set out as well.

-Fantastic.

(Daniel) So there was a rule that the--that property was only allowed to take up one quarter of the plot.

(Dr. Nubia) And is it the idea to create a model village that supports the business?

(Daniel) George Cadbury's motivation for creating a village like Bournville was only partly about the factory and the fact that he was a businessman.

-Right.

-He was a-- he was a Quaker by faith.

-Right.

-He had a social conscience and he wanted to make a difference, not just the people in Birmingham who were living quite often quite tough lives... -Yes.

-...but he wanted to influence the politicians in the country to show what could be done to improve housing and people's lives.

Do we know that the people who worked here were happy?

The general consensus is that this is a great place to live, and perhaps linked to their happiness was their-- was their health as well.

They carried out a survey to compare particularly children who'd grown up in slum-like conditions... -Yes.

-...and then compared them and their health when they came to live here in Bournville.

-Right.

-So on average boys were about 10 pounds heavier than their comparable age from the city center... -Wow.

-...living and children.

(Dr. Nubia) Well, was that because of all the chocolate -that they drunk?

-Well, ah, I'm sure they might've had a little bit of chocolate.

(Dr. Nubia) No, I'm being glib, I'm being glib here.

-No, no, please do go on.

-Who wouldn't as well?

This provided the vital evidence to the powers that be to improve housing elsewhere.

(pleasant music) (Dr. Nubia) With parks, greens, and tennis courts, there's no doubt that the residents of Bournville enjoyed a better quality of life than those in other parts of Birmingham.

♪ Um, well, what is this?

-It's called the Rest House.

-Yeah.

(Daniel) It was built to commemorate the silver wedding anniversary of George Cadbury and his wife Elizabeth, and it was paid for by the Cadbury employees.

-I see.

-So they wanted to show what George and Elizabeth meant to them.

-What was it used for?

-Well, it was a meeting place, somewhere for community to gather, and what a perfect spot.

(Dr. Nubia) Absolutely fantastic.

During the Victorian period industrialists in Birmingham tried to change its reputation.

They designed model villages that would eradicate the slums.

But there's one final side to this story I want to share and it concerns people not here, but thousands of miles away.

We have George Cadbury looking down at us and it's a beautiful setting, but I can't help but remember that the cocoa that Cadbury used was farmed by indentured laborers and enslaved people.

This I cannot forget and I cannot forget that the sugar that they used in their dairy milk chocolate was also farmed by indentured laborers and enslaved people.

So whilst urban development could work for those living here, by the late 1800s it's worth remembering that Victorian industrialization had a human cost and this suffering stretches beyond Birmingham, the city of a thousand trades.

(dramatic music) ♪ (bright music)