Nomadic Allotments: London’s Farming Future

By Heather Ring

The advent of farming was significant in the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a settlement culture, and with that, land and property divisions, urban development, and social stratifications. Today, with all of London’s land divided into plots, or slated for development in vacant lots, and with communities displaced and histories erased, allotments have taken to roaming—–nomads stopping between transient homes.

Olympic Plots

Like many sites slated for regeneration, the myth propagated about the grounds designated for the 2012 London Olympics is one of a post-industrial wasteland—–an area of disuse and blight. Situated in Hackney Wick along the Lea Valley Corridor, most Londoners—–excited by the prospect of hosting the games—–have never ventured this far into East London, and so readily accept a narrative that fails to address the many com¬munities and habitats uprooted by the development. Hackney Wick is, in fact, a challenging place to explore, though there is a compelling disorientation in navigating the industrial maze of artist-squatted warehouses and untamed marshlands along the canal. The Manor Garden allotments, which have occupied the site for a century, have now become a symbol of the communities displaced by the Olympic development scheme. Allotment gardens, or land leased from public or private own¬ers and distributed to families or individuals for the purpose of cultivating food, have been around since the 19th century as country retreats. They were later re-appropriated in the early 20th century as a wartime strategy to encourage citizens on the home front to contribute to the domestic food supply. Interest in these initiatives subsided after World War II, and London’s subsequent development schemes did not set aside new land for urban agriculture. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in changing this through the grow-your-own movement, but the land shortage resulted in waiting-lists for plots as the surviving allotments are passed down through generations of families.

When the Olympic development committee announced plans to develop this site for the games, a few vocal activists spearheaded a campaign to save the Manor Garden allotments, but they were unable to mobilize the majority of the original plot-holders so as to present a unified front. Unlike the collec¬tive efforts that groups of people dedicate towards community gardens, which simultaneously function as local public spaces, allotments are divided into adjacent private plots—–protected by fences and planning approvals—–often miles away from the homes of their owners, each with their own idiosyncratic storage sheds. The plots are occupied by people of diverse ethnicities, ages, and backgrounds, which results in differing approaches to how their gardens are tended. (Traditionally, the overgrown romantic patches of the middle class sit adjacent to the tidy functional plots of the working class.) This also challenges the perception of whether the allotment gardens are viewed as a shared responsibility or a set of individual concerns. Those who attempted to speak on behalf of the group in protest brought significant visibility and press to the negative impact of Olympic development, and made a case for preserving the allotments as an international symbol of London’s commitment to the urban agriculture movement. The Olympics marks a critical opportunity to bring international visibility to the urban food systems of London, but the Manor Garden allotments were slated to be swept to the side, like homeless cleared from the streets before a televised parade. They did however manage to secure an arrangement in which the allotments would temporarily be moved to another site, and then re-established in the vicinity of their original site, after the games.