Earlier this year, Charlotte Mendelson reached the top of the waiting list for a London garden plot. “For me and my allotment it was love at first sight,” she writes. “I have changed my phone background to a photo of my precious one. Her name? 38b.”
I signed up for my London garden allotment so long ago that the application was by post and possibly in Linear B. In my borough of the city, there are about two hundred plots for just under three hundred thousand residents. Understanding that a miniature Eden would not instantly be mine, I imagined that I might at least have one in time for old age: something to look forward to when I was not writing brilliant novels in my later years. Then, in February of this year, an e-mail arrived.
The English allotment system began several centuries ago, when landlords, often fearing civil unrest, would “allot” small parcels of land to the poor. Since the eleventh century, when William the Conqueror’s auditors first surveyed the tax potential of every stream and hill, the country’s total quantity of “common” land had been shrinking, and ahad made it ever harder for non-landowners to feed themselves.
In the U.K., as in the U.S., this vision of self-sufficiency thrived during the Second World War, when rationing made a necessity of growing food for oneself. The practice stayed alive in the following decades, fuelled in part by a wildly popular TV sitcom, “The Good Life,” about an attractive suburban couple who turn their back garden into a small farm. But the trend did not last. In the eighties, the parcels began to be sold to developers. Councils dodged responsibility.
Even the Manor Gardens, an allotment site in Hackney that was bequeathed “in perpetuity,” in the early twentieth century, by a British aristocrat, was uprooted, in 2007, to make way for the Olympic Park. This was in spite of community members’ desperate attempts to save the gardens. (Among these advocates were the founders of a local restaurant, Moro, who wrote a fantastic cookbook, “
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