Respectable Leisure
- Sara Fox
- Jun 30
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 1
The Birmingham Botanical Gardens
By 1829 Birmingham was losing its green spaces. The red and liver coloured bricks of the warehouses, factories and housing were encroaching. What was a land of wild grasses, flowers and herbs had been decimated, smothered in brick, cobbles and the detritus of industry. Local industrialists and professionals identified the effects this encroachment was having on the people of Birmingham. They set up a committee and, with immense foresight, sought to create a space where the workers of Birmingham could escape the destructive effects of the industrial revolution. Thus, an eighteen acre farm on Lord Calthorpe's Edgbaston estate was acquired for the project.
Later in the 1800s, Joseph Chamberlain was credited with the transformation of Birmingham. Nicknamed "Joe Gas'n'Water", he knew what people needed to produce better quality work whilst protecting their health. By the time Chamberlain left for Westminster in 1876, the town had five public libraries, six parks and three sets of municipal baths. Victoria Square with its immense council headquarters was also close to completion. In that year he became the President of Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society. Chamberlain supported the reformers who since the 1830s had pursued a programme of social control. Their intentions had borne fruit. Townspeople were able to engage their leisure time 'wisely'. Reformers had actively encouraged environments considered to be 'morally secure and proper'. Victorian parks were designed to educate through monuments, museums, galleries and glasshouses. Even their design and planting were part of what became known as 'respectable leisure'.
By 1878 the gardens had become a dominant presence in Birmingham — exactly the kind of place where you might celebrate a milestone birthday.
My short novel, 'Angelina', drops the reader into the filthy heart of Victorian industrial Birmingham. It was a relentless, bone-achingly hard world and, whilst I never shy away from the grit and harshness of those times, I knew that the reader would need a lift — some light amongst the dark secrets Angelina was forced to carry. The following is an excerpt from when Angelina arrives at the Botanical Gardens for the first time. An Irish Romani, she had grown up in the countryside of Ireland and, forced by the Great Famine, had found her way to Birmingham where she had lived for the last forty years as midwife, handywoman and layer-out of the dead. Here's how Angelina first saw the gardens, in an excerpt from my forthcoming short novel which accompanies A Legacy Forged.
Angelina stepped down from the cab at the gates of the Botanical Gardens, and for a moment just stood there, one red and roughened hand on the door, blinking. The skies seemed wider somehow than in the centre of town, as though there were more air to breathe. She could see the sky, for that matter, normally it was masked by a veil of coal dust and smog, but today a clear blue sky with a few puffy clouds and a bright, cheerful sun graced them.
“Come on, Angelina,” Matthew called, paying the driver. “We’ll have your birthday wasted on the street if you stand there, gawping.”
Sarah slipped her arm through Angelina’s and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Let her look,” she said. “It isn’t every day a woman turns sixty in such a place.”
Sixty. The word felt strange, like a number that belonged to someone else. Matthew and Sarah had already passed that milestone a few years ahead of her.
Angelina’s day had started early, just before five o’clock at dawn, setting bread to rise for her family. Then she went to check on a neighbour’s new baby before gathering the newly baked bread and heading to her family’s house in Summer Lane. Her daughters, Katie and Lizzie, gave her homemade gifts of a brooch and a pin for her hair. Clara, who appeared harassed from the day already, gave her a beautiful coloured jar to keep her herbs in. All the grandchildren gathered around, keen to give Nana hugs and ask where she was going. It had been a lovely start to the day.
Now she found herself facing the ornate iron gates of the Botanical Gardens and a neat lodge, a gravel sweep, and beyond that, emerald green grass spilled out like a bolt of green cloth laid smooth by a careful hand. There were colours and shades of colours that her heart barely remembered from all those years ago in Ireland.
Beds of flowers curved and looped in patterns, each edged with tightly clipped low box hedging. There were clumps of tall, feathery plants with purple spikes, drifts of pale pink roses, and solid, cheerful collections of familiar herbs and shrubs with blazing colours of reds, yellows, mauves, and blues. A broad walk stretched ahead, lined with plants she did not know the names of, all glossy-leaved and orderly. She was rooted to the spot, taking it all in.
“It’s like a paintin’,” Angelina murmured, her eyes taking in every detail.
“It’s Birmingham,” Matthew said with quiet pride. “Or what Birmingham might be, if men like Chamberlain have their way. Respectable leisure, he calls it. For everyone.”
“Not for everyone,” Angelina said, but there was no heat in it. Her eyes were already wandering. Glass roofs glinted in the distance, and something that looked like a great white birdcage nestled among the trees.
They strolled slowly along the central path. Sarah matched her pace to Angelina’s, choosing not to rush, mindful that lingering itself was part of the gift of this place. Men in bowler hats and women in neat bonnets drifted by, children in starched pinafores clutching hoops and sticks, their voices a soft chatter taking to the air with the birdsong. In the distance, she heard a band tuning its instruments.
“Listen,” Sarah said. “They’ll play in a little while.”
Angelina stood still and breathed in. The smells were all wrong. No coal smoke, no sour reek of the courts, no sharp tang of carbolic. Instead, there was damp earth, a faint sweetness from the flowers, and a touch of something warm and green as the sun struck the dampness of the grass.
“I don’t think I’ve smelled these scents since I left Ireland with Isaac.” She looked at her friends with deep gratitude in her eyes. “Ah, sure, it’s magic,” she sighed.
She felt suddenly self-conscious of her best dress in plain dark blue, mended at the cuffs with small, neat stitches. Sarah’s gown was newer, the cloth finer, and Matthew’s coat had the easy fit of a man who could afford to choose. She should have stung with envy. Instead, she felt an odd, humble gratitude that they had thought her worth the expense of the cab, the entrance, the day.
“Where to first?” Matthew asked. “The glasshouses? Or the bandstand?”
“The bandstand,” Sarah said. “They’ll be playing any minute.”
As they walked towards the sound of brass instruments warming up – scales up and down, with no order or symmetry – they arrived at a fountain. Four tiers of Coade stone stood at the heart of a round, like a monument to cool fluidity. Water rose and cascaded from tier to tier, catching the sunlight in sheets and threads, falling into a wide basin of pale stone. The faces of lions engraved at each quarter roared back at them.
Angelina stopped several yards short and drank it in. The water sparkled like diamonds, and the sound of it fascinated her. Steady, soft, random patters of droplets making their own kind of music captivated her as she tried to make sense of it.
“I never thought I’d hear water fall for its own sake,” she said quietly. “Instead of from a burst pipe or a leaky roof. Just…” She gestured helplessly, trying to find the word.
“For beauty,” Sarah finished for her.
“Ah! For beauty.” Angelina nodded.
Matthew cleared his throat gruffly, breaking the spell. “Come and look closer, Angelina. You’ll see yer face in it.”
She stepped nearer, misted water touching her skin, soft and cooling. In the rippled reflection in the vast bowl of water, she saw herself. The deep lines, the grey now threaded through her dark hair beneath the bonnet, her mouth set in its familiar firm line. But the background was not a cramped room or a narrow court, it was sky and trees and stone carved into impossible shapes. For a moment she had the queer sensation of seeing into another woman’s life, one where days were not measured in wash loads and confinements and deathbeds.
If you enjoyed that short excerpt, you can enjoy the whole novel this summer. I'm awaiting a cover for her and then it will be available for pre-order either in paperback or on Kindle. To read her blurb, click here.
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You can read more about the Birmingham Botanical Gardens from their website. I highly recommend it as they have all the history of its design and some lovely pictures and events.
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