Before entering the works, a few steps further along the road will give us some idea of the many advantages gained by moving the factory out into the country.  Just opposite the lodge a sloping path leads to the cycle-house, where some 200 machines are stored during work hours.  Beyond this, in the middle of a flower garden, stands the Estate Office of the Bournville Village Trust, and in the background higher up a girls’ pavilion can be seen through the trees.  Behind it stretch asphalt tennis-courts and playing-fields, bordered by a belt of fine old trees, under whose shade wind pretty shrubbery walks lined with rustic seats.  A passage under the road leads straight from the works into these beautiful grounds, and on a summer’s day few prettier sights could be found than the numbers of white-robed girls who stream across in the dinner-hour to revel in the sunshine of the open fields, or sit in groups beneath the shady trees, enjoying a picnic lunch.  A little further along the road the trees and the rhododendron bushes sweep backwards, leaving an open space, where a smooth lawn reaches to the front of a fine old mansion, for many years used as a home for some fifty of the work-girls whose own homes are at a distance, or who have no home at all.  The fruit gardens and vineries belonging to “Bournville Hall” are used for the benefit of work-people who are ill.

[Illustration—­Black and White Plate:  Coronation Cricket Pavilion, Bournville.]

Turning back again, we find on the other side of the road a magnificent pavilion, the Coronation gift of the firm to their employees, which overlooks the broad level stretch of one of the finest cricket grounds in the Midlands.  Away in the hollow beyond, the Bourn forms a picturesque, shady pool, part of which is used to make a capital open-air swimming bath for the men.  In the rising background are the pretty houses and the gardens of the model village.  Still retracing our steps, we now come to the original cottages built by the firm.  Plainer and less picturesque than those of more modern construction, their air of comfort, and the creepers which cover many of their walls, make them harmonize well with their surroundings.  One of them is now used as a youths’ club, providing games, a circulating library, and reading and lecture rooms.  Another contains club rooms for the office staff.  In passing we catch sight of a fine swimming bath for the girls.

Through the lodge and under the clematis, a few steps bring us to the private railway-station, which in size would do credit to many a town.  Here trucks are loaded with finished goods and despatched to their various destinations.  Every working day of the year a long train, extending often in the busiest season to as many as forty truck-loads, steams out of this station to scatter the productions of Bournville over the face of the Earth.  Close by the station we turn into the offices, where the fittings and general arrangement convey an air of refined solidity according well with the goods produced.