UK: Winning a London Garden Allotment
In 1850, the Victorian garden writer George Johnson observed that “there are a great number who really have no ground to till, except, perhaps, an atom of damp earth behind their dwellings.” It would do “unspeakable good,” he added, to lease out “pieces of land near every village.”
By Charlotte Mendelson
New Yorker
July 29, 2022
Excerpt:
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. I had reached the top of the waiting list, and would I like to visit the prospective site? I could hardly type back quickly enough. When I arrived, rain was pouring. This was a mark in my favor—I was no fair-weather gardener. I was approved and given a padlock-combination number, a list of rules, and as much wood-chip mulch as I could carry.
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 a series of Enclosure Acts had made it ever harder for non-landowners to feed themselves.
