Imagine the scene. A young family is being shown around one of the new flats that have popped up in an urban neighbourhood. They are standing in what will be the living room, and the estate agent is pointing at something. “You really don’t need a garden. Plenty of green space nearby,” he says, nodding sagely. “Just behind the old boozer over there, you see: allotments.” Ooh, allotments. Does anything scream bohemia more than organic, seasonal, locally-grown produce with appealingly working-class overtones?
So, allotments have become infused with a touch of the bourgeois; who cares? It is true that they are more socially diverse—no longer overwhelmingly dominated working class men of a certain age—but this need not imply some sort of trend towards hipster superficiality. Those who are only interested in getting a plot to take a photograph of themselves wielding a purple cauliflower for Instagram won’t last long (and have a name: ticklers.)
What is worrying about the above scene, however, is that allotments are being appropriated as some sort of promotional place marketing tool; they signify community, history, authenticity. Who wouldn’t want to live near allotments? The surrounding area becomes edgy, vibrant and sought after.
So sought after, in fact, that the allotments (and the boozer, and the nightclub, and everything else that endowed it with any character) after a while start to seem again like relics from a former, less polished age: a wasteful way to use land that now has such an astronomical value. And then there’s the housing crisis, of course. Couldn’t the area do with some more flats?
Prominent allotment historians Crouch and Ward have noted a shift away from ‘traditional’ allotment gardening towards “grassroots movements and social enterprise [which are] busily providing more [informal] growing spaces.” For them, this means that “the establishment and/or improvement of sites is probably more feasible now than at any time since WWII.” What need, one might ask, is there for the ‘formal’ allotment given the rise of the ‘new allotment’?
Put simply, the ‘new allotment’ is not permanent—indeed, its informality (its illegality?) can play a part in its subversive appeal. Yet many of the benefits of allotment gardening derive in large part from an attachment to, and knowledge of, a particular piece of land and a strong sense of community. Transitory or pop up allotments and guerrilla gardening practices are not a replacement. What, then, is to be done?
*** Most allotment sites in England are protected by legislation dating back to the early twentieth century, but in practice this legislation has tended to be interpreted in such a way as to make it all too easy for even these ‘statutory’ sites to be sold off. Local authorities cannot dispose of their statutory allotment sites without first obtaining ministerial consent which, in theory, should not be given unless adequate alternative provision within a reasonable distance of the original site is made for those that are displaced.
What, however, does ‘adequate’ mean in this context? What does ‘reasonable’ mean? They are, perhaps necessarily, vague terms.
In 2014, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) set out some example scenarios where alternative provision would not be deemed necessary at all, such as where “there are no existing plot-holders on that site; and there is no one waiting for a plot on that site.”
Whilst at first glance this seems reasonable enough, the use of ‘on that site’ is actually quite problematic: what about other sites? Since a local authority has no legal obligation to advertise plot vacancies, it is more than plausible that there might be an entirely vacant site with no waiting list in an area that does in fact have very high demand.
It is little wonder that a Freedom of Information request submitted in 2014 found that between 2007 and 2014, 194 of 198 applications for applications to dispose of statutory sites were granted. And then there the private and non-statutory local authority owned sites, which do not even require ministerial approval to dispose of.
Yet there is hope. Under the Community Right to Bid, which was introduced in 2011, communities can nominate their allotment site to be designated as an Asset of Community Value which means it cannot simply be sold privately; the community group would be notified of the intention to sell and would then have six weeks to decide whether they wanted to bid for ownership of the asset themselves. If they did, the sale would be paused for six months to allow time to raise the necessary funds.
Getting an allotment site registered as an ACV doesn’t guarantee anything—the right to bid for a listed asset is not the right to buy it. But it is to resist. Nominating a site as an ACV demonstrates political will to the Council, to the wider local community, and to developers. It also gives sympathetic planning authorities a material planning reason that they can use to refuse any applications that seek to redevelop the site.
*** Only 33 allotment sites in London are registered ACVs, all of which are in Bexley, and all of which were nominated by the same group. In Manchester, only two allotments are registered ACVs and again, both are in the same borough (Stockport) and were nominated by the same group.
The most common type of ACV in both Manchester and London is the community pub, a trend which is reflected nationally: data provided by DCLG in response to a Freedom of Information request submitted earlier this year shows that 2,264 of the 5,137 ACVs to have been registered in England since 2011 are pubs (i.e. 44 per cent). Many of the pubs listed as ACVs in London and Manchester were nominated by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
There is no comparable ‘Campaign for Allotments’ dedicated to getting allotment sites registered as ACVs. Perhaps if there was such a group, allotments would account for more than just 3 per cent of total ACVs across England.
Allotments are about more than just vegetables and flowers. They are, and always have been, emblematic of political struggle, their very genesis having been a reaction to the practice of parliamentary enclosure in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In Charles McKay’s wonderful book Radical Gardening, allotment gardening is situated within the wider practice of radical gardening, wherein the garden (or the ‘plot’) is the site of (radical) political struggle.
Tending an allotment is “willfully anti-capitalist” in that it is “predicated on a social and economic practice defined by ‘the gift relationship.’” In this light, it can be seen as a rejection of consumerism, social isolation and the over-reliance on supermarkets that reduced or non-existent access to land entails: a “space of … eco-activism.” I suppose they call it grassroots for a reason.
