Westbourne Road Town Gardens (Birmingham)

 garden, allotment (gardening), Grade II Listed (UK)

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Also known as the Guinea Gardens. A now rare survival of a set of mid C19 rented town gardens.

In the late C18 and early C19, many of the larger industrial towns had sets of rented town gardens, often forming a ring around the densely developed town centre. As the towns grew, so these garden sites were pushed ever further from the centre, only to be lost entirely as development continued. A national survey (Lambert, 1994) has indicated that very few of these sites survive either in their original form or, indeed, at all.

The Westbourne Road site as it exists today represents the core of a more extensive area of gardens, which retains the basic structure, if little of the finer details, of the mid C19 site. As shown on maps such as Samuel Bradford's of 1751, and Piggot Smith's of 1828, C18 Birmingham was surrounded by large numbers of town gardens laid out in blocks detached from any residences, which were available for rent.