Turn right by a scrapyard, right again just beside a bus depot, cross a small bridge and you come to Reg Hawkins’ patch of east London heaven.
The 75-year-old former graphic artist has had a plot in Hackney Wick’s Manor Garden Allotments, where he grows broad beans, swede and “four rows of garlic”, for 54 years. “It’s a little island,” he says. “It’s our little Shangri-La.”
Even on a murky Tuesday morning, it is easy to see why. Surrounded by urban wasteland, this near century-old patchwork of vegetable gardens exudes an air of tranquillity and quiet industry that is somehow both quintessentially British and rare beyond measure in 21st-century London.
“From top to bottom of the allotments, we have newts,” says Julie Sumner, a plotholder of 14 years’ standing, who speaks with pride of her 40-year-old vine and three-metre asparagus bed. “We feed over the summer probably 200 families – and we meet each other.”
Not so long ago, allotments seemed as dated an idea as manual typewriters or circuses with wild animals. But the popularity – and cost – of organic fruit and veg has triggered an influx of middle-class allotment-holders and reinvigorated the institution.
“Years ago, people dug an allotment because they had to. If they wanted fresh fruit and veg, they had no choice,” says Claire Willis of the Corby-based National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners. “Now they are doing it as a lifestyle choice.
“Once people have children, they start becoming interested in where their food comes from. Many professional people start thinking: ‘Buying organic food is costing me a fortune. I am sure I can do it myself.’
“Allotments have always been considered a poor man’s garden. But more and more, we are finding that typical middle-class families, who would have gone to Sainsbury’s or Marks and Spencer to shop, have got their own plot.”
Despite the recent surge in middle-class interest, there are now only about 300,000 plots around the British Isles, far below the 1m-plus thought to have existed at the time of the second world war and even the 530,000 or so recorded in 1970. What’s more, according to Willis: “In the past two years, we have lost as a nation more than 100 football pitches’ worth of allotments.”
Manor Garden Allotments itself faces an imminent threat. The site is in what will become Europe’s biggest construction site, the future Olympic park that will be the centrepiece of the London Games in 2012. Barring a change of heart by decision-makers, plot-holders will soon be obliged to vacate the site and the allotments levelled. According to the London Development Agency, the area will be “part of the main Olympic concourse”, with “a significant part of the site [needing] to be lowered by up to six metres in order to provide a flood prevention area”.
Plot-holders such as Reg Hawkins and Julie Sumner are not to be left empty-handed. The LDA is trying to ensure they have somewhere to relocate to until the Olympics are over, although it was dealt a setback recently when Waltham Forest council turned down an application for a temporary site. The Olympic Delivery Authority emphasises that plot-holders will be able to return to the Olympic park post-2012, but to another new site. This will “provide more facilities . . . be more accessible and offer the optimum level of privacy and security”.
This seems a bit like bulldozing a swathe of the New Forest while promising to make good the loss by planting a bigger area with saplings: it would be a long time, if ever, before the harmony and charm of the original allotments were restored. As Sumner puts it: “We are a community just as deeply rooted as our vines and our fig trees. You cannot plonk us down 1.5km away and expect us to go on as if nothing is happening.
“When you look at the rhetoric about a green Olympics, it does seem a mite hypocritical.”
Clearly this is not some east London version of the Sistine Chapel or Angkor Wat that may be lost forever. Nor would I, a certified sports nut who enjoys gardening as much as bog-snorkelling, argue for one minute that the 2012 Olympics should be halted for a mound of vegetables. But in their unassuming way, the Manor Garden Allotments are a special, perhaps irreplaceable, social asset worth taking pains to preserve.
Given the immense effort of will expended to bring the Games to London in the first place, against the odds, I cannot believe the Olympic masterplan could not be tweaked in such a way as to prevent their destruction, even if access for plot-holders needed to be denied for a while. It is not as if construction of the actual Olympic facilities is under way yet.
An e-petition on the prime minister’s website calls for the allotments to be incorporated in the 2012 site, rather than demolished. Olympic leaders are fond of talking about the legacy of the Games for the communities that stage them. It would be a crying shame if these cherished plots cannot be preserved as part of this legacy.
For more information about Manor Garden Allotments, go to www.lifeisland.org and on allotments in general,www.nsalg.org.uk
