Demand The Allotment

25th May 2008 1:52AM, posted by tim march

LOST LANDSCAPES

by D.F. Randell of Allotments Alive

"Every interest goes its own way, regardless of anything but itself so long as it meets no opposition. Every measure is equally indifferent to the politician; a reform only becomes valuable to him when he can hope by it to serve his Party, but in order to do so, those who desire it must be a force, and be able to lend force."

"All that land used to be allotments when we first came here." I stare gloomily at the late twentieth century alternative and try to recreate the scene my narrator describes of a lost landscape, full of busy people. Before addressing the 'how' and 'why' of decline in allotments, and their latter-day resurgence - (one might equally address the decline of the bicycle) - it is necessary to construct a society with priorities and a townscape so entirely different from our own that we must struggle mentally to believe that it persisted into our own century. Secondly, we should beware of accepting the 'inevitability' of events - an essentially passive stance - for, since every generation is, in theory, free to choose its own values, determinism can reflect in many ways. What is clear is that, in each generation, a few will be found to resist actual or perceived immiseration, and that 'custom' dies hard - for Custom is the 'lag' of History.

Thus, it is understandable that those deprived of their "livings" in the vast, commonable open fields that surrounded all towns and villages before the Parliamentary Enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, should seek reparation for their loss. The bitter and endless struggle for allotment land was only one form the agitation took - among those who did not emigrate to "free land" overseas. Natural, too, that the dispossessed should flood into towns, bringing the dog, the hens and the yard pig with them.

"These little plots did not emerge out of a desire to leave the town, but they emerged through a struggle to hold onto land and wrest it from enclosing owners. Others claimed land from inside the city; they could not afford to leave it. The allotment became significant in the way people knew each other. They shared seeds, produce and hints. For many, these were all they had to give." Crouch & Ward, The Allotment, its Landscape and Culture, Mushroom Press, 1994.

Those remaining in a deserted countryside were equally desperate, as Joseph Arch perceived:

"The night had fallen pitch dark; but the men got bean poles and hung lanterns on them. I mounted an old pig-stool, and, in the flickering light of the lanterns, I saw the earnest, upturned faces of those poor brothers of mine - faces gaunt with hunger and pinched with want - all looking towards me and ready to listen to the words that would fall from my lips... I stood on my pig-stool and spoke out straight and strong for Union."

When, in 1884, Agricultural workers finally got the vote, they declared they would only vote for an Allotments candidate, and in 1886, a Government actually had to resign on the allotments issue. So, imagine a time, early this century, of small towns and villages surrounded by orchards, glass-houses, allotments and market gardens; when land was still plentiful and life locally based and locally sustained; a time before luxury superseded necessity in the order of things and virtually everyone had an allotment, a pig, pigeons, rabbits, hens and fruit trees. Counterbalance it with large families, cramped housing, long working hours, low wages, no Public Assistance and the shadow of the Workhouse; with Friendly Societies, Cooperatives, Pig Clubs, Dispensaries and a massive emphasis on mutual aid. As early as 1837, George Loveless (the 'Tolpuddle Martyr') had answered his own question before a Commons' Select Committee on this very matter:

"When will they attempt," he asked, "to raise working man to the scale in Society to which he can lay claim from his own utility? Never, no never will, (with a few honourable exceptions), the rich and the great devise a means to alleviate the distress, and remove the misery felt by the working men of England. What then is to be done? Why, the labouring classes must do it themselves, or it will for ever be left undone." Allotments were restricted to the "labouring poor". We shall see, shortly, what happened when they were not. The 1908 Liberal Government consolidated previous allotment legislation and continued the requirement of compulsory provision where a need was deemed to exist. It is thanks to that Act, today, that everyone in Britain is still entitled to a quarter of an acre of land, (an "Allotment Garden"), for self-provisioning. How green our cities could become once again, if everyone took up their rights in land!

Allotments are supremely features of locality. They must, by law, be "conveniently situated". They are about independence, self-help, and the resilience of the human spirit that finds a consumer dependency or rootless poverty degrading. They help solve a problem in community, allowing local people some empowerment over their immediate environment on their little Plots. This 'get up and go' spirit is no more manifest than in wartime, for 'Independence' is also valued at national level, it seems. Post war periods bring austerity measures, but they also bring a sense of a new start - a brave new optimism that things can 'be better' now. "Every interest goes its own way, regardless of anything but itself," and, no doubt, allotment gardening would have happily done so, were other forces not at work.

The Land Settlement Act of 1919 removed the restriction on the provision of allotments solely for the "labouring poor", and gave local authorities increased power to provide land for returning ex-servicemen. Another (more ominous) Act of the same year allowed "Corporations" for the first time to buy up land and hold it (or sell it) in advance of future use - a privilege only previously enjoyed by private individuals. By these two Acts, old ties were loosened. Allotment land could now become "temporary" land - used as allotments but held in advance for some other purpose. Insecurity of tenure became a new and disturbing factor. The period shows a new, entrepreneurial clientele of gardeners, rushing into "corporation" in order to buy up land. Scrutiny shows the balance tipping away from the 'poor' and from the right to subsistence agriculture as allotments were snapped up and the new, "Private" allotments came into being. Established shop-owners, market gardeners, seed merchants, a fashionable 'autocar' company director, a furrier, and Corporation men - the Mayor, the Town Clerk, all bought allotments, the price of plots doubling within the first month of purchase. Those who could not afford to buy, became tenants once again as sub-letting clauses were introduced. No doubt genuine allotmenteers were amongst this medley of purchasers. But, for many, the potential return on speculative land investment was to the forefront of their minds. Contemporary comment makes this quite plain. Many private "Allotment Societies" went on to buy more and more land, but sad to say, unless the council put up the purchase money, very few of them self-imposed any "agricultural restriction" on their land, to save it for posterity. Overwhelmingly, it has been the private allotments that have been lost.

Throughout the '30's, pressures increased for slum clearances, with new emphasis on "light and air" and estates, with 20 poles of garden attached, reduced the demand for the allotments that they were frequently built upon. "The enemy of urban allotments is not sloth but the builder" was a terse observation when more and more private sites sold out and tenants were evicted. And so we are again without land, but seduced by fast foods and supermarkets, which, having gobbled up a green-field site, sell "eco-friendly" products to their mobile customers and install a bottle bank in the car park for six hundred cars. As life accelerates, stress management "clinics" and stress "consultants" proliferate - neither term medically protected - and filthy air fills our towns.

How can an allotment, that green oasis of plum trees, birds, frogs, butterflies, cabbages and elderly gardeners, financed by jumble sales, the site blighted by planners' ever-changing whims, withstand multi million pressures and P.R. "mumbo-jumbo" of the late twentieth century? Evidence is growing of a new "breed" of plotholder, with different value judgments on wellbeing that address the totality of life; a younger person, perhaps, not so deferential to authority, and more critical of it. At present, numbers are still small. There are isolated, heroic "pockets" of resistance by those who do not hold that modernity is necessarily a virtue. It is hoped that others will follow and numbers will grow, for:

"Truly, you Counsellors and Powers of the Earth, know this, That wheresoever there is a people, thus united by Common Community of livelihood into Oneness, it will be the strongest Land in the World, for then they will be as one man to defend their inheritance."

The most dedicated Plotholder today, is still the person whose cultivation is based on need to supplement home economy. This is likely to increase in a country whose population is due to become top heavy with older age brackets, and with a workforce increasingly offered part-time employment, or fixed term contracts. A "job for life" seems likely to be a thing of the past. Currently, councils are giving away Allotments that are underused, rather than stimulating interest in them. Recent legislation permits unwanted(?) allotment land to be handed over to Housing Associations at "Nil Value" for social housing. One large site was recently sold for one pound, and now has an allotments waiting list for the tiny portion of allotment land still left. This makes a mockery of any future allotment provision and "the ancient right of independent access to the soil for every tiller of it" envisaged by Lord Carrington as the purpose of the 1908 Allotments Act.

Ironically, these most recent measures pitch the poor against the poor, the disadvantaged being required to give up their allotments for the homeless. Environmentalists are hard put to persuade a Labour Council to agonise over loss of urban wildlife when people have no homes. "Environmentalism is a middle class luxury" said one Councillor airily, as he voted away yet another allotment.

Allotments Alive - P.O. Box 307, Northampton NN1 3NF.

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