Allotment

A memory of being small, crouched down between blackcurrant bushes heavy with winking dark beads of fruit. The leaves over my head, a green cave. This space became my private playhouse on Saturday mornings when I visited the allotment with my dad, each gap between the bushes serving as a different room. I am alone in this memory, happy and secure, a contented small child’s certainty that this is the way of the world. Although of course, my father was in reality only feet away, digging, raking or considering his compost heap. During the week he would cycle ten miles each way to central London, where he worked as an antiquarian bookseller, spending his days with illuminated manuscripts on vellum, and incunabula, the earliest of printed books. The contrast between his weekday and weekend selves was acute.

Other memories surface, exploring a neglected plot, overgrown with grass, or chasing my younger brother up and down the sunbaked mud path in the middle of the site. Care had to be taken with these activities, as my dad lived in fear of ‘the committee’, a group of older retired men who seemed to have endless hours to tend their allotment. I once overheard him laughingly tell mum in the kitchen that he had been warned to ‘control your children’ and that dark mutterings had been made about blacklisting him. I can still feel the sense of injustice that burnt in me, I knew better than to trespass onto any of their neat rows, I knew the rules.

Allotments are sometimes portrayed as cosy or comic in English culture, unthreatening. Consider the media’s peculiar fascination with Jeremy Corbyn’s courgettes. But sifting through the layers of allotment history reveals radical roots, and they continue to be a contested space in the present, posing questions about who has access to land. A few years ago I read Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England? and concluded (spoiler alert) it’s not us. As I research there are so many promising shoots to follow, it is an effort to keep my ideas in order, I’m at risk of wilding myself into a tangle. For example I find it pleasing that the current standard allotment is based on an Anglo Saxon measurement of 10 rods, a tiny echo of feudalism and the strip farming system. Whilst we quite rightly discuss the importance of access to nature for all, and its impact on wellbeing, access to land was once a matter of life and death. By the mid-nineteenth century multiple Enclosures acts meant that the rural poor were at risk of starvation due to the loss of common land. Legislation was introduced to allocate small parcels of land for food production. This was not a purely altruistic act by the state, but was also driven by a fear of civil unrest. In the present day, cash-strapped local authorities eye up their allotment holdings appraisingly, and controversial private allotment providers like Roots have spotted a gap in the market for those on long waiting lists for a council plot.

This is a scheduled post as I'm working today, it's based on some notes I made during my nature writing course last year. The photo shows some strawberries growing in my back garden a few years ago, this year's crop is still green. I have space for a small amount of food production in my garden but have recently joined a waiting list for my local allotments as I'd like to grow more.