George Cadbury had already created some houses for key workers when the Bournville factory was built. But in 1893 he bought another 120 acres near the works and began to build houses in line with the ideals of the embryonic Garden City movement.
His wife Dame Elizabeth Cadbury planned Bournville Village alongside her husband, and her memoirs tell us how these plans became reality:
‘When I first came to Birmingham and we were living at Woodbrooke, morning after morning I would walk across the fields and farmland between our home and the Works planning how a village could be developed, where the roads should run and the type of cottages and buildings.’
Gradually this dream became reality. Many of the first tenants were men in Mr Cadbury's Adult School Class, who had previously lived in the centre of Birmingham and had never had a garden. Now they lived in healthy surroundings and cultivated their gardens, many of which had apple trees.
In 1897 Richard Cadbury built the Bournville Almshouses, an attractive quadrangle of cottage-like homes around a central garden, on the southern edge of the village on the corner of Linden and Mary Vale Road. Built mainly, but not exclusively for pensioners of Cadbury Brothers, this group of Almshouses still exists today. The Bournville Almshouses Trust was established to administer them, endowed by rents from 35 houses built at the same time.