There are now thought to be about six million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as 40 years in one London borough. There have also been huge numbers of
words written trying to explain their revival.
Perhaps the real question is why they ever went away, given the success of the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War, one of the most successful attempts to galvanise the public into
action.
There were 1.4m allotments by 1943, by which time over a million tons of vegetables a year were being grown in gardens, parks and waste land. There were radio programmes (3.5 million people
tuned into C. H. Middleton’s gardening slots), even Dig for Victory anthems. By 1970, only a generation after the end of the war, there were only 530,000 allotments left, and a fifth of those
were vacant. What went wrong?
Perhaps it was the end of rationing in (1954), and the beginning of self-service supermarkets (1950) that ushered in a different sense of plenty. Perhaps the remains of the old sturdy working
class image of allotments made them seem old-fashioned, especially to the Labour Party which became averse to cloth caps.
Policy-makers had a housing crisis on their hands, and then a balance of payments crisis and then an energy crisis. They were anyway deeply suspicious of informal solutions or informal landscapes.
It was all so untidy.
But perhaps it was also that the romanticism of the allotments movement — that hint of Back to the Land — was considered dangerous in a technocratic age. The Nazis had provided a
frightening glimpse of what romanticism mixed with politics might mean.
Back to the Land was promoted between the wars by right wing groups like English Mistery and English Array, and by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Mosley’s
enthusiastic acolyte, the novelist Henry Williamson, took it so seriously that he bought a farm in Norfolk and struggled with farming it throughout the war. His agricultural advisor Jorian Jenks
— later one of the founders of the Soil Association — urged that Britain should grow all its own food, with fixed prices, low-rate loans for farmers, small scale farming and so on.
These were exactly the policies brought in by the Agriculture Minister Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith in 1939. Dorman-Smith was a former member of English Mistery, with its opposition to tinned food and
the degradation of the soil, and also the architect of Dig for Victory.
Those who had advocated self-help agriculture before the war had certainly been romantics, but some of them had been interned during the war as potential enemies of the state — including
Jorian Jenks. Maybe that is what went wrong for the allotments movement in the 1950s. Official policy turned against romantic enthusiasm for growing things.
Whatever happened, something has now shifted back — and that has interesting implications too. Are we seeing the next twist of one of the oldest ideologies of them all — the idea of
going Back to the Land?
On the Eighth Day, God Created Allotments by David Boyle is available as an eBook.
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