VISITING Birmingham’s historic suburb Bournville is like taking a step back in time.

Unlike other parts of the city, where Victorian architecture often mixes awkwardly with modern buildings and properties designed over decades of development, Bournville remains a visual time warp.

The wide, pretty tree-lined streets that make up the 1,000 acres of the Bournville estate are dotted with 8,000 picturesque homes that have barely changed since they were first built – some as far back as 1895.

The story of Bournville began with the Industrial Revolution which saw those fed-up with the bleak reality of rural life flocking to cities in the hope of earning higher wages promised by factories, such as Birmingham’s legendary chocolate makers Cadbury. But Cadbury brothers George and Richard were not only shrewd businessmen, they were social philanthropists who were appalled at working class living conditions and wanted to provide decent housing for their workers.

It was in the late 1800s they decided to move their successful factory from the heart of Birmingham to land four miles south of the city centre, planning a model village they called Bournville.

Instead of the overcrowded industrial slums, the brothers sought to create a village, spread over 142 acres, with spacious houses providing decent sanitation and plenty of green land surrounding them, as well as shops, places of worship, sports and community facilities.

In a move then unheard of, they insisted the properties were affordable for industrial workers and available for rent for those who could not stretch to buying their own homes.

In 1900 George founded the Bournville Village Trust, a charity set up to ensure the development and maintenance of the estate in a bid to preserve it for future generations.

The trust still exists today and is so determined to keep the Cadbury brothers’ dreams alive that it works tirelessly to ensure Bournville retains its social vision.

In recent years it has campaigned to keep the Cadbury’s rule of no pubs or shops selling booze alive in an attempt to stop the area being blighted by drunken anti-social behaviour.

And it also imposes strict rules about what changes homeowners or tenants can make to the fabric of the houses in order that they do not lose their historic aesthetics.

But now some of the houses are undergoing a milestone makeover which is necessary to bring them into the 21st Century.

More than 310 properties rented by Bournville Works Housing Society (BWHS), which forms part of Bournville Village Trust, are being stripped of their 100-year-old timber doors and windows and replaced with modern PVC-U replacements.

It’s the first time in Bournville’s long history that plastic-framed windows and doors have been allowed on such a large-scale and forms part of a drive to make the village more environmentally-friendly.

It also comes after the Government has ordered social housing providers to slash the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from both their new and existing properties after new figures revealed that the average UK home produces six tonnes of C02 every year.