Westbourne Road Town Gardens, or Westbourne Road Leisure Gardens, is a group of allotments in

Edgbaston Edgbaston () is an affluent suburban area of central Birmingham, England, historically in Warwickshire, and curved around the southwest of the city centre. In the 19th century, the area was under the control of the Gough-Calthorpe family an ...

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...

, England, created in 1844. It is listed Grade II in

Historic England Historic England (officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England) is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It is tasked wit ...

Register of Parks and Gardens The Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England provides a listing and classification system for historic parks and gardens similar to that used for listed buildings. The register is managed by Historic England ...

History

Birmingham in the late 18th and early 19th century, like other large industrial towns, had sets of rented town gardens around the centre. in 1831, there were more than 2000 around the city, with plots divided by hedges, and having a brick or timber summerhouse. The Westbourne Road site was originally part of Birmingham Botanical Gardens; the botanical gardens were created in 1832 from a farm on the Calthorpe estate of

Baron Calthorpe Baron Calthorpe, of Calthorpe in the County of Norfolk, was a title in the Peerage of Great Britain. It was created in 1796 for Sir Henry Gough, 2nd Baronet, who had previously represented Bramber in Parliament. Born Henry Gough, he had assu ...

. In 1844 the southern third was given up, because of excessive expenditure, and was laid out by the 3rd Baron Calthorpe as a set of gardens. By the late 19th century, The Westbourne Road Gardens were among the few such sites that remained in Birmingham. Some plots were later lost: in the 1880s when the railway line on the southern border (opened as a single track line in 1876) became a double track line; in the inter-war period due to expansion of the

Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society, informally known as The Archery and based in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham, England, is the oldest lawn tennis club in the world. The club was founded as an archery club called the Edgbaston Archery S ...

; and in the 1950s to create playing fields for Edgbaston Girls' School. In the 1970s the City Council (the leaseholder) demolished the brick summerhouses on the plots.

Description

The basic structure of the original gardens remains, but little of the details. The plots, divided by traditional hawthorne hedges, are in three main strips separated by access tracks. To the north is Birmingham Botanical Gardens; on the south-eastern edge there is a railway line (the

Cross-City Line The Cross-City Line is a commuter rail line in the West Midlands region of England. It runs for from Redditch and Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, its two southern termini, to Lichfield, Staffordshire, its northern terminus, via Birmingham New Str ...

) and the

Worcester and Birmingham Canal The Worcester and Birmingham Canal is a canal linking Birmingham and Worcester in England. It starts in Worcester, as an 'offshoot' of the River Severn (just after the river lock) and ends in Gas Street Basin in Birmingham. It is long. There ar ...

Other listed garden allotments

* Bagthorpe Gardens, Nottingham * Hill Close Gardens, Warwick * St Ann's Allotments, Nottingham * Stoney Road Allotments, Coventry

References

{{Reflist Grade II listed parks and gardens in the West Midlands (county) Edgbaston