http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article5804...



My allotted place in our green and peasant land
As the world slides into economic chaos, more and more people are wanting a safe little patch of earth to cultivate
Ben Macintyre

Spring is coming. The economy is disintegrating. And I must fix the allotment shed.

When the going gets tough, the British go hoeing. In the Second World War Britain was determined to Dig for Victory. Today, in ever-increasing numbers, we Dig for Equanimity, in small patches of British earth, the muddy historical inheritance of a peasant people.

Demand for cultivation space in cities is suddenly booming. After two decades of steady decline, the waiting list for allotments is now 100,000 applicants long, and growing. For the first time in half a century, sales of vegetable seeds have outstripped those of flower seeds. Urban chicken coops and beehives are spreading.

Last week the National Trust, Britain's biggest private landowner, announced that it would be creating 1,000 new allotments on its properties. Small patches of vegetables will now spring up alongside the great parks and country houses. The recognition is long overdue, for the allotment, the realm of the ordinary man, is as much a part of the national culture as the grandest estate - beside the palace of the prince grows the democratic power of humble, home-grown veg.


The allotment surge is the product of many factors: thrift, demand for lower food-miles on our carrots, the health benefits of exercise and fresh produce. The value of shares may go down (or down), but the average allotment still costs just 65p a week.

The benefits of self-tilled soil are not merely nutritional and economic, but cultural and psychological, a feeding of the soul in some ancient, and peculiarly British way. During the war, the number of allotments in Britain almost doubled to 1.4 million, reflecting not merely the need, in Churchill's words, “to grow the greatest volume of food of which this fertile island is capable”, but also to divert an anxious population from the rigours and uncertainties of war.

The British allotment was a statement of self-sufficiency, resilience and individual liberty, though it was born from land theft and Victorian paternalism. The Enclosure Acts between 1750 and 1860 eliminated the common rights to the use of land, and provided minimal acreage in compensation, “field gardens” for the labouring poor. The very word “allotment” implied land handed down from above by generous authority as a benefit.

Victorian legislators encouraged allotments to keep the lower classes out of trouble and the boozer. “The object in making such allotments is moral rather than economic,” declared The Penny Magazine in 1845. “The cultivation of a few vegetables and flowers is a pleasing occupation and has a tendency to keep a man at home and from the ale house.” Yet ordinary people continued to demand land to cultivate as a birthright, resulting in the 1908 Smallholdings and Allotments Act, and its successors, requiring local councils to provide otherwise unused land for growing vegetables.

Allotments are still often measured out in “rods” of 5.5 yards, an ancient unit of measurement that may have originated in the typical length of an ox goad, a medieval cattle prod. For the modern allotment still recalls a time when land was divided into strips for each villager, when the monk tended his individual garden, when the world was divided into units of peasant cultivation, hundreds, tithings, hides and oxgangs (an area of land that one ox could plough in a season). Our ancestors were reassured by a world divided into allotments, and so are we.

Other nations have their own allotment culture: the jardins familiaux in France, the Danish Kolonihave, the German Schrebergarten - invented by doctor Daniel Schreber in the 1860s as a way of offering the urban poor vegetable self-sufficiency.

Albert Einstein was a keen, though disorganised allotmenteer. In the early 1920s he spent summer hours in his allotment in Berlin-Spandau, and referred to his shed as his Spandau Castle. But relatively speaking, Einstein's allotment was a mess. In 1922 the allotment committee complained that “weeds have spread all over the whole parcel and have soared. The fence is not in order, and the whole allotment makes an unaesthetic impression.” Soon after, Einstein left.

If the German principle of allotment maintenance was precision, then the British principal has usually been one of riotous non-conformity. There is no more British landscape than the allotment, each parcel of land a reflection of its owner: ramshackle sheds built from discarded wood, the rotting slabs of carpet, strange wafts of netting and tottering garden chairs. Some patches meticulously weeded, others sprouting weeds in every direction, like Einstein's hair.

There is something beautiful in the ugliness, something heroic and proud in the small statements of individual character. The allotment is a little portion of private terrain, unowned, but shared and self-governing, a sort of miniature commonwealth.

Since the war, that natural British landscape has steadily eroded. Interest in allotments and self-grown vegetables began to disappear, as ever more exotic foodstuffs arrived ever more cheaply on supermarket shelves. In the madness of the property boom allotment land was seen, by hungry developers, as a wasted opportunity. The Church of England and British Rail sold off large chunks of allotment land. Growing your own food was seen as faddish and eccentric, the fantasy of urban dreamers hankering for the Good Life.

But now, in a crisis, the allotment is back, and with it a sense that land is not just for speculation, but for cultivation. We have had an allotment in North London for three years. The head gardener, or wife, makes the decisions about what goes into and comes out of it. I get to do some tilling, and shed maintenance.

But even that promotes a strange feeling of connectedness with the past as if, in extracting food, on a seasonal basis, from a small patch of soil beside the A41, I am talking to my peasant neighbour, investing in something that will hold its sturdy value and meaning as the world slides by percentage points.

Spring is coming, and I must fix the allotment shed, my Cricklewood Castle.