Description:Holidays were mainly the preserve of the middle classes in the late nineteenth century – the poor had very little time off and very little spare money to spend. A public park therefore provided a unique opportunity for a free day out and, in most parks, such as Calthorpe Park in Edgbaston, a rare mingling of middle-class and working-class people took place. The Botanical Gardens, also set in Edgbaston, were different.
'Perhaps the only spot given up entirely to the élite is the Botanical Gardens. One’s costume must be very special and one’s manners very correct and assured, to risk mingling in that select crowd which paces the well-kept grassy slopes, to the music of that superior band. Fashion, accompanied occasionally by its twin-sister folly, here reigns supreme, and its votaries do not care to jostle with the vulgar throng, who have their own times and places'.<small><sup>1</sup></small>
This panoramic view, taken in 1908, provides a literal snapshot of middle-class recreation on the ‘well-kept grassy slopes’.
On Bank Holidays, the ‘vulgar throng’ were offered a rare opportunity to participate:
'On Bank Holidays the great unwashed are ‘loosed in’, as they would express it, for the small sum of twopence, and enjoy to the full the brilliant glory of the hot-houses […] and while sauntering down the shady paths, listening to the song of countless birds, try to forget that tomorrow morning will take them back to the stifling air of the engine-room or the unpoetical monotony of the wash-tub'.<small><sup>2</sup></small>
Middle- and working-class people did, of course, meet in their daily lives, but usually in the context of a strict hierarchy, for instance as employer and employee or servant and master. Those Bank Holidays in the Botanical Gardens must sometimes have been the occasion of awkwardness between employer and employee, when the usual distinctions were blurred.
The gardens are an example of the ‘gentrification’ of space in Edgbaston. When the lease was obtained in 1830 from the Calthorpe Estate ‘There were then only a farm-house and some fields on the site. The farm-house was adapted for the curator’s residence’.<small><sup>3</sup></small>
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Birmingham Faces and Places, August 1888, p.53
<sup>2</sup> Birmingham Faces and Places
<sup>3</sup> Edgbastonia, (November 1884)</small></font>