Description:Towards the end of the 19th Century, it was decided that keeping children in the workhouse with adults was no longer desirable. To this end, the Board of Guardians in Birmingham decided to build cottage homes following the model used at the ‘Home for Little Boys’ in Farningham, Kent.
Building was finished in late 1879 when the cottage homes comprised of 14 cottages (seven for girls and seven for boys), each of which could house 30 children. There was also a house for the superintendent; a school for 420 children; an infirmary; stores, workshops and a bakery and a swimming pool. Children were transferred into this ‘mini village’ from January 1880.
In the following years, other buildings were added – a lodge and superintendent’s office in 1881, a laundry in 1899, two more cottage homes and a church in 1905, two cottages for infants in 1912 and an assembly hall in 1924. The cottage homes complex also had a large area of farmland and houses to accommodate farm workers.
Cottage Homes along similar lines were later built at Shenley Fields and Erdington.
There were strict limits on the visits that parents and other relatives could make to all the cottage homes. In 1912, for example, visiting days at Marston Green were restricted to the third Wednesday of each of the months of January, April, June and October. In 1922, the public road next to the cottages was closed and a new road built farther away because (as the minutes of the Birmingham Union stated) “On bank holidays and other times, large numbers of undesirable relatives of the children go to Marston Green and make themselves a nuisance”.
In 1930 it was decided that, because a new programme of boarding out was being introduced, there was no need for all three cottage homes in Birmingham. Marston Green was closed in 1933 and the site became part of Coleshill Mental Hospital.
Most of the Marston Green Cottage Homes buildings have been demolished to make way for new housing. However, on the Coleshill Road end of the site, some buildings have been retained and incorporated into the Pinewood Business Park which is now based there. The lodge, for example, the chapel and two or three of the homes are still there.
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Image: Plan of Marston Green dated 1928. Photograph of girls in Marston Green in approximately 1911.
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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.