Description:Ferndown was effectively the last home to come into being on The Gardens. In 1948, the workshops which had previously been used to train children in particular trades or skills, was converted into a children’s home and called Ferndown.
It was at the far end of the Gardens, and the closest home to the Sick Bay and the Chapel.
Unlike the other homes which were all initially known by their numbers before being given names, Ferndown began life with a name which it maintained throughout its time as a children’s home.
Mark, a resident of the Gardens in the 1970s, remembers that Ferndown was known as the Cattle Shed.
It appears that Ferndown was a mixed home and accommodated children of all ages. By 1979, the home had 12 beds and accommodated both boys and girls.
An edited transcript from an oral history interview with someone who lived in Ferndown in 1980:
"I remember it being very full of children and I remember we had a girl who was about sixteen who had had a baby and she was living there as well. And there were dormitories, there was the girls’ and boys’. And we were at, trying to think, we were at this end of the building and the girls were at the other end. There was a great big long corridor and toilets in the middle. There used to be great big playing fields at the sides of all these homes. I started to go to, for the first time properly, to an outside school called Spring Lane."
Ferndown was closed as a children’s home some time between 1982 and 1984.
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Image: The building we believe to have been Ferndown photographed in 2010.
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Source: This history was compiled by the Birmingham Children's Homes Project, an initiative to explore Birmingham City Council-run children’s homes between 1949 and 1990.