Birmingham Day Two: Cocoa & Curry

After a cracking first day in Birmingham which included not just the Back to Backs but also a quick tour of the trendy Digbeth neighbourhood and a choral concert in Birmingham Cathedral, I was ready for more adventures and some company. But first I enjoyed breakfast at a ridiculously friendly café near the AirBnb, where I lingered in the warmth, read the paper, and basked in the glow of a truly excellent Full English, killing time before going to meet my four companions for the day when their train from London arrived at Birmingham New Street and we transferred for the short hop to Bournville, the physical and spiritual home of the Cadbury chocolate dynasty.

John Cadbury opened the first Cadbury shop in Birmingham in 1824 where he sold tea, coffee and a chocolate cocoa drink he prepared himself using a mortar and pestle. These hot drinks were intended as replacements for alcohol, which was frowned on by Cadbury’s Quaker faith. The shop was successful enough that in 1831 he started a commercial factory nearby producing 16 varieties of drinking chocolate and 11 kinds of cocoa. In 1847 an even larger premises was secured in central Birmingham. And by 1861 John Cadbury retired and passed the business on to his sons Richard and George, who planned the company’s next steps.

An early advertisement for Cadbury’s Cocoa

When a further expansion was needed in 1878 George Cadbury decided to try to create a factory that was a world apart from the dirty industry of Birmingham’s 1000 trades and crowded Back to Backs. Instead he sought out a parcel of land just four miles south of the city and convenient to both the railroad and canal where he built not just a new factory, but an entire model village to house Cadbury factory workers and their families. (And here I use “model” in the sense of “ideal”, not this.) Which is why we had to travel the short distance to Bournville, still a happily inhabited village and the aforementioned premises of Cadbury’s for the last 138 years.

Along with establishing a new factory, George Cadbury paid for the construction of a number of cottages for factory workers to ‘ameliorate the condition of the working-class and labouring population... by the provision of improved dwellings, with gardens and open space to be enjoyed therewith'. The village grew and George built more and more houses, along with extensive parks, field hockey and football pitches, and indoor and outdoor swimming lidos for the benefit of his workers. In 1900, he established the Bournville Village Trust, which still manages the rental of low income housing and maintains many green spaces and other facilities. Bournville is still a going concern and in 2003 was touted as the “nicest place to live in Britain”, though the one notable lack in the community is the absence of pubs. (Shock! Horror!) True to his Quaker faith, George Cadbury did not allow drinking establishments in Bournville, a prohibition that stands to this day.

And now, finally, on to the chocolate! In addition to the actual development and manufacture of chocolate, Cadbury’s now also operates Cadbury World - an attraction for visitors that’s so popular we had to buy timed entry tickets in advance. And while Cadbury’s chocolate is now manufactured at other sites as well, the development of every Cadbury product, including the iconic Dairy Milk, Flake, Milk Tray, Double Decker, Wispa, and Creme Egg happens at Bournville.

When we finally got to the front of the queue after killing time in the World’s Biggest Cadbury Shop, we were each given two full sized chocolate bars to sustain us through the attraction - a Crunchie and a Dairy Milk Oreo. (For the record, among the myriad varieties that have been spun off from the classic Dairy Milk are Dairy Milk 30% Less Sugar, Dairy Milk Big Taste Toffee Wholenut, Dairy Milk Big Taste Triple Choc, Dairy Milk Big Taste Bacon Blast, and Dairy Milk Premier League Pitch. One can only hope that the last one refers to the shape of the bar and not the flavour.) (Also, I might have made up one of those.) Thus fortified, we ventured in.

The experience starts with a fairly standard issue set of slightly creepy dioramas on the origins of chocolate, an area called the "Aztec Jungle”, which skips through the discovery of the Mexican delicacy by western explorers.

The story quickly turns to the Cadbury family, complete with the video commentary from actors portraying the Cadburys, père et fils. Thankfully, there was only a minimal amount of the tedious live action role-play that vexes me so much. There was, however, a very cheesy video about chocolate making where the audience seating benches actually shook back and forth to mimic the agitated journey of the cocoa beans through the manufacturing process. I think there was also a puff of air somewhere around our ankles at the point where the cocoa husks were blown away from the beans. Truly, it was a multi-sensory experience. There were further displays on manufacturing, but it was more fun when we got to attempt for ourselves the notoriously tricky process of tempering liquid chocolate.

One of two large tables where the ubiquitous purple-coated oompa loompas demonstrated tempering chocolate by hand. There were large signs nearby warning that we were NOT to eat this chocolate. However, we had recently been given ANOTHER full Dairy Milk Bar, so it’s not like we were gagging for the stuff anyway.

Poised to display my savant-like skill in manual chocolate tempering. 
Or possibly in spackling walls.

Soon after there was this bar where you could get a little cup of liquid meted chocolate that most assuredly was for eating, topped with various crumbly yummy things like Cadbury Buttons and crushed Oreos and mini marshmallows. Like a sundae bar, but without bulking up the whole thing with tedious scoops of ice cream.

After that extra sugar injection, it was on to a section about Cadbury’s advertising through the ages. It think this was probably the favourite area, despite that fact that only two of the five of us had grown up with Cadbury’s advertising and hence the rest were mostly baffled by the nostalgia reminiscences of the cheeky Wispa commercials and the Fudge Finger song. Still it was amusing to see the early print adds touting the health benefits of cocoa.

“Contains in a remarkable degree those natural elements of sustenance that give the system endurance and hardihood… Light refreshing and invigorating to the jaded mind and body” - Family Doctor.

But best by far was the oddly morbid but brilliant 2008 campaign for Creme Eggs, “Here today, Goo Tomorrow.” These short spots featuring stop motion animated Cadbury Eggs meeting their doom in various Heath Robinson-esque ways and are so utterly fantastic that you have to watch all of them right now.

Don’t even think about skipping this. It’s too brilliant.

Soon after we exited through the gift shop, home to a predictably dizzying array of chocolate products at such suspiciously low prices that it was hard to contain oneself.

For instance these Dairy Milk bars were about half the size of that small child for a mere £5.00. They also have what purported to be the world’s largest Toblerone bars - 4.5 kg of triangular goodness for £45.00. I was relatively restrained and only picked up a few bars of the new Dark Milk variety and a slab of the recently reintroduced Bournville Old Jamaica.

After we escaped the gift shop and were back in the harsh light of day we tried to visit one of the other attractions - the 4D Chocolate Adventure - but the queue for that was 45 minutes long and we’d already been shaken in our seats like naughty cocoa beans, so instead we popped into the Bournville Experience, a small museum on the history of the town itself and George Cadbury’s philosophy behind it. There was also a large display of almost 2,000 bits of Cadbury memorabilia gathered by one Gill Cocks, who donated her entire collection to the company in 2009. What we most assuredly did NOT do was stop in the Cadbury Café which had on its menu such delights as “Beef Chili with Cadbury Chocolate Sauce” and “Chilli Con Carne and boiled rice with Cadbury chocolate and tortillas”.

And this abomination. Shudder. For the love of all that is holy Cadbury, give it a rest!

We eventually escaped Bournville and its satanic mash feeling slightly queasy from too much chocolate and ready to find a drink and dinner. (Or at least I was most definitely ready for that.) After a brief detour for some sight-seeing in central Birmingham and a pint at a warm canalside pub we were ready to contemplate one last adventure, in the form of an unexpected but famous Brummie specialty.

Balti is a particular form of curry dinner that is popularly believed to have originated not on the crowded streets of Delhi or steamy southern beaches of Goa but in Birmingham in the 1970s. Balti refers to the meal itself and to the dish it comes in - a balti dish being a individually sized wok-shaped metal bowl pressed out of thin steel in which the meal is both cooked and served. It’s normally accompanied by naan bread instead of rice, with the bread used to scoop up the food and wipe the dish clean. Balti Houses, most of which are clustered in Birmingham’s famed “Balti Triangle”, are normally not licensed but allow diners to bring their own alcohol. Birmingham’s Balti heritage is so strong that in 2015 it was given EU Protected Name Status, like Melton Mowbray Pork Pies or Cornish Clotted Cream.

I’d never had a Balti before so I was excited to give it a go, especially since we’d taken pains to go to a particularly recommended Balti House - Adil’s - that served the famed “table naan” - bread so big it’s meant to cover the whole tabletop. How could we not go to a place that serves food the size of furniture?

 

It really is big.

The Balti itself was nice, but I didn’t find it particularly different from any number of other Indian dishes I’ve had before. It’s meat and veg in spicy sauce, in a metal dish. True, there were a lot of possible variations on that theme - Adil’s had twelve different styles of Balti, each available with chicken, chicken mince, chicken tikka, beef, beef mince, lamb tikka, vegetable, prawn or king prawn. Or you could mix and match your own combination. It was frankly a bit hard to navigate and despite everyone ordering something different what ended up arriving all looked (and to some extent tasted) pretty much the same. Still the food was tasty and the naan was huge and by that time in the day I was just glad there was nothing on the menu that came topped with Cadbury Chocolate Sauce and slices of Creme Egg. The only real snag was that the neighbouring shop-that-sold-wine didn’t open in time for us to have a glass with dinner (which seems like appallingly bad business sense on the part of Tom’s Wines and Spirits, through we eventually got over it).

And that was Birminghan, Day Two. However before I sign off, I'll let you know what I did with that Bournville Old Jamaica bar on a subesquent Sunday afternoon, when Storm Ciara hit. Tucked up at the marina there was no real danger, but the winds were still fierce and the boat rocked and the ropes creaked and the rain poured so I literally did not set foot outside for the whole day. Instead I hunkered down and, inspired by my reminiscences of Cadbury's, whipped up a batch of brownies from the collection of recipes on their website. (Which include this little number. I'm surprised it doesn't appear on the menu at the Cadbury World Café.) The only chocolate I had hanging around that I wanted to put in brownies (as opposed to putting directly in my face without the intervening baking processes) was the Old Jamaica bar and a rogue Dairy Milk. Hence the rum and raisin twist I imposed on the more classic recipe.

Bournville Old Jamaica Rum & Raisin Brownies

Ingredients:
120g Bournville Old Jamaica Rum and Raisin Dark Chocolate (Astute GSWPL Readers without access to this delight could probably substitute other dark chocolate and add a splash of rum extract.)
120g butter or margarine
2 eggs
165g sugar
50g flour plus a bit
30g cocoa plus a bit (I even had actual Cadbury's Bournville cocoa on board!)
1 ounce rum (Rum! Mark my words, it's going to be the next big thing. We've reached Peak Gin. Gin is over. Rum's the thing.)
1/3 cup raisins (Just don't even think about bringing any raisin-hate my way. Or claiming it's an abomination to add raisins to brownies or whatever. My blog, my rules. Give me raisins or give me death!)

Method:
Soak the raisins in the rum. Let them sit for at least half an hour. (It helps to stab them repeatedly with a fork so the rum soaks in better. Also it’s fun.)
Preheat the oven to 175C (350F).
Line an 8” x 8" (20cm x 20cm) cake tin with parchment paper.
Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler (Bain Marie for UK readers) and then cool slightly.
Whisk together the eggs and sugar until thick and creamy and then fold into the slightly cooled chocolate/butter mix.
Mix the flour and cocoa together and stir it into everything else. (Note the recipe called for sifting this, but we know my thoughts on sifting already.)
Once you get tired of soaking the raisins squeeze off the excess rum, down it in one shot, and then dust the raisins lightly in a mix of flour and cocoa.
Fold the raisins into the batter.
Pour into the tin and bake for 20 minutes, until the middle is set but not too set.
Allow to cool before cutting.

Enjoy!

Back to Backs in Brum

Piran was going with some other friends anyway, to tour the Cadbury Factory. So I figured I might as well tag along because who wouldn't want the chance to play Charlie Bucket? And then I figured I should probably go the night before, since getting to the train station from my current mooring is a faff and they were leaving early. And then I thought if I’m going for one night I might as well go for two and actually see some of the town. Plus it was kind of my birthday weekend anyway. Which is how I ended up spending three(ish) days in Birmingham, England’s second city.

Quick Birmingham primer: First, it's pronounced BURR-ming-um. Not, under any circumstances, BURR-ming-HAM. (And while I'm at it please, for the love of God, can someone tell Canadian news readers that it's BUCK-ing-um Palace. Not BUCK-ing-HAM. Maybe I'm just overly sensitive due to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Harry and Meaghan thing but it's just got to stop.) Ok. Birmingham. The second largest city in the UK (population four million-ish in the metro area) is about 100 miles north and a bit west of London and was once the hub of a huge amount of skilled manufacturing, large and small, leading to its nickname: "the city of a thousand trades". Also affectionately called "Brum", the residents are known as Brummies and the Brummie accent is notable and distinctive. Being a former industrial hub, it's also got a lot of canals. If I'd kept going north on the Grand Tour instead of turning towards Oxford I'd have ended up in Birmingham. Brummies like to remind you that their city has more miles of canals than Venice. Oh, and of course there's "Peaky Blinders".

Moving on: the first order of business when I arrived on Friday afternoon was a warming lunch of ramen, because it was chilly and rainy and my next stop was a pre-booked tour of the Birmingham Back to Backs in what is now Chinatown, which promised to be interesting but not centrally heated. Back to Backs are a form of terraced house that were once very common in cities like Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester. As the name implies, Back to Back house were built along a common back wall and - as with other terraced houses - with shared side walls as well. The front was the only wall with windows and doors. With so much shared structure it was a very inexpensive way of building a lot of houses, a necessity for the rapidly expanding factory towns in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Back to Backs were built cheaply, often very substandard construction, and with no inside toilets, water or electricity. With only one open wall for doors and windows ventilation was bad, and they were poorly lit. Sharing outdoor toilets and a communal laundry room among all the residents of the courtyard, disease was also common and residents of Back to Backs were noted to have poorer health than more salubriously accommodated citizens. Nevertheless, the pressing need for housing and the cheapness of the form meant that at one point there were thousands in Birmingham alone and more than half a million people lived in Back to Backs. The Birmingham Back to Backs are the last surviving courtyard of this once ubiquitous form and are now owned by the National Trust and operated as a museum.

The Back to Backs Museum, exterior. The narrow arched opening on the right is the entrance to the central courtyard. And the corner is now a traditional Sweet Shop!

Our tour guide was excellent, and the museum is set up really well. Each of the four preserved houses is styled in a different time period, showing the progression of time and relative improvement in living conditions right until the last tenant of the last house left in 2000 (a commercial tailor… but more on him later). It’s particularly poignant because the houses depict the life of real people known to have lived in those very houses.

We assembled in the courtyard where you can see the other end of the arched access corridor on the left. The tour began in the house whose address was styled as “1 back of 50 Inge Street”, meaning that anyone who knew your address knew you lived in a Back to Back.

Number 1 was styled for 1830 and unlike most National Trust properties, in the Back to Backs we were encouraged to touch things, which was really refreshing. Our guide even told us it was fine to sit on the furniture and poke around in drawers and such. There was a decent coal fire burning in the grate on the ground floor, so I positioned myself there while listening. The detail in the rooms is impressive, (reminding me a bit of this place) but we were asked not to take photos of the interiors, so I’m relying here on photos from other people who flouted the rules and then brazenly posted their misdeeds online, supplemented with some nice shots by the National Trust itself.

The 1830s ground floor sitting dining room, including stencilled wall pattern in lieu of wallpaper. Apparently wallpaper was heavily taxed at the time and dodging the tax could result in the death penalty! I’m definitely a bleeding heart liberal, but even so I think we can all agree that execution for interior design is a bit harsh. And if you really must, then surely there are greater crimes than wallpaper? Like what about wall-to-wall carpet in the bathroom? That surely deserves at least a good flogging.

The houses had just one room on each of three floors with a narrow winding staircase linking them. Those stairs were an elfin safety nightmare and our guide warned us to be careful approximately eleven zillion times. The next level was the main bedroom, with a smaller bed for a child in the same room. On this level, they’d also knocked through to the front unit facing the street, which has been left in the state in which it was found when the National Trust acquired the property in 2000. It’s in a sorry state, with a lot of peeling plaster and layers and layers of paint and wallpaper (the tax was eventually repealed). Interestingly, the other two front-facing halves of the Back to Backs museum have been renovated into holiday homes that can be rented! One is done in Victorian style and one in 1930s style, with appropriate furniture and fittings and with the mod cons like a kitchenette and bathroom tucked away but still functional. Fun, but a bit out of my price range for a quick wekeend getaway.

The upper floor of 1830s house was set up as a bedroom for two boys and also housed the workbench for the father of the house, whose trade was making the cut brass hands for clocks. It was fantastic to be able to paw through the tools on the bench, which was set in the window on the highest floor to make the most of every hour of daylight available.

You can just see a flattish peg jutting out from the concave cutout in the front edge of the work table, which is called a peg bench, and is common in jewellery and watchmaking even today. The wear and tool marks on the peg are unique to each craftsman, but the connection is universal, so a maker could remove his peg from one bench and slot it into another if moving among different workshops. Apparently this is the origin of “square peg in a round hole”! (This photo from the National Trust. Nicely done with the lighting effect here, NT.)

Moving into the 1870s house, you could see already that the living situation had improved. In 1830 all water had to be carried through the streets by the bucketful from a local standpipe. They had an example of the bucket in 1830-land and even empty it was hefty. Apparently it was common to send children as young as six years old many times a day to haul water. It must have been an exciting moment when around the time of the 1870s house a water pipe was installed in the shared courtyard.

The 1870s family - the Oldfields - had ten children, so one bedroom included a double bed in which four kids slept, topping and tailing (two at the head end and two at the foot end). Also crammed into the same small room was another narrow bed, curtained off with a single suspended bedsheet. This was let out to two strangers - possibly of mixed gender and not known to each other - who’d have to share the bed for sixpence a week, not including meals. It’s also worth noting that each bedroom I saw had a fireplace, but it was unlikely to have been used much. Coal was expensive, so fires were kept lit in the ground floor sitting room, but the other rooms were rarely heated. (A bit like living on a boat...)

Like the watchmaker from 1830, Mr. Oldfield also practised his trade from home, and the ground floor of the 1870s house included the worktable where he made glass eyes for taxidermy and for people who were victims of all-too-frequent industrial accidents. His tools included a tiny gas torch that was used to heat sections of thin glass rod in many different colours, which he’d mix carefully to match a customer’s eye colour exactly.

Mr. Oldfield’s Output (another photo from the National Trust)

Moving into the 1930s things improved significantly. The 1930s house had running water in the scullery and an electric light in the ceiling. The most interesting part of 1930 was in an upper floor bedroom where one of the beds was covered in a collection of seemingly random objects that we were encouraged to play with. Evidently the National Trust is oversupplied with odds and sods that people donate so they lay some as a way of getting use from things. Many of the items were hard to identify, but I was quite taken with a handheld device that resembled an oversized cigarette case, but had a handle that dragged a centre section back and forth on a rack and pinion system while flipping it over at each end. It turned out to be a device for stropping razor blades that would go into safety razors. A highly satisfying little mechanical gizmo.

The last building we visited was also the last to be occupied. It ended its working life not as a family home but as a tailor’s shop run by Mr. George Saunders. He ran his business in that location from 1974 to 2000, when he retired and donated the contents of the shop to the National Trust, who’ve preserved it as he left it. This was the only area of the Back to Backs Museum where we were forbidden to touch anything.

The preserved work room above George Saunders’ shop.

George’s story is remarkable. A Caribbean immigrant who arrived in the UK from St. Kitts in 1958 he experienced such prejudice as a black person in the tailoring trade that he had to take work in a biscuit factory for years while saving up money to set up his own shop. He bought four Back to Backs and ended up knocking through the upper floors to create a work room big enough for a 25’ long cutting table, utterly ignoring the total lack of structure that resulted from removing the interior walls. Luckily, everything stayed standing throughout his 25 years of trading, though the National Trust were quick to swoop in with acro-props and engineers when they took over the property.

George Saunders Bespoke Tailoring was a respected fixture in Birmingham and though it was a small shop, George had some important and longstanding contracts, including making riding breeches for the Royal Guard and supplying uniforms for schools in Libya. No wonder he needed the extra space. And I’ve mentioned that the stairs in the Back to Backs were exceedingly steep, so you can probably infer that there wasn’t much headroom in those stairwells either. This makes it all the more remarkable that George Saunders managed to occupied the space for 25 years, considering he was 6’ 8” tall. Apparently he suffered from frequent bumps on the noggin. After his retirement George remained a friend to the Back to Backs, though one hopes the frequency of concussions was greatly reduced.

The last stop on the tour was back in the central courtyard to visit the shared facilities.

The earliest shared toilet was a simple bucket, emptied into a central cesspit in the courtyard that was also used for ash and other waste, called a miskin (a word still used in the local dialect for a dustbin). Later innovations saw a plumbed water closet installed, though it was still outside, shared, and very much unheated. It wasn’t until the 1960s when indoor, private toilets might have been installed in the houses themselves.

Next to the toilets was the wash house where laundry was done. This room was also sometimes called the Brewis (more of that local dialect, it’s a contraction of Brewhouse) where men would brew beer in between wash days. The wash house had a large water vessel suspended above a fire where water could be heated to wash clothes. Anything and everything might be burned in this fire to save on coal, including using dried potato peelings as kindling. And of course the water to fill the copper would have to be hauled by hand so it’s no wonder the hot water was used not just for washing clothes but also for boiling whelks, eggs and potatoes, steaming a pudding, or washing the baby.

Wash days were assigned to each household to prevent conflict. Which is good, because it wouldn’t do to get one of those heavy irons upside the head for jumping the queue.

We finished up outside in the courtyard close to two hours after starting and I was very happy to spend a few minutes warming up in the neighbouring sweet shop where I stocked up on rum balls for the trek to my AirBnb. Once ensconced there I quickly cozied up under a blanket with a cup of tea. There was still a lot more on the agenda in Birmingham, but that's another blog. So stay tuned for lots and lots of chocolate, another dip into Birmingham's industrial past, and naan bread big enough to shelter under.