This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing brings together twelve vibrant pieces from gardeners, food writers, novelists, horticulturalists, and historians in a glorious celebration of these entirely unique spaces: plots that mean so much more than the soil upon which they sit. To celebrate the launch at the Garden Museum on Tuesday 11 June (tickets available to attend in person or watch online: book tickets), the book’s editor Sarah Rigby will be joined in conversation by allotment historian JC Niala, chef Olia Hercules and writer Kirsteen McNish.
Ahead of this conversation, we are delighted to share this exclusive extract from the book by JC Niala:
OLD BOYS AND HIDDEN WOMEN
JC Niala
I don’t look as though I belong on an allotment site. My clothes are a little too clean and I prefer trainers to boots, which any serious allotmenteer will tell you are impractical. Over the thirty-six months that I carried out doctoral fieldwork on allotment sites across Oxford, I gave up trying to appear like a ‘typical’ plot owner and instead focused on the benefits of being an obvious ‘incomer’. Incomers are outsiders and as someone who has, one way or another, been an outsider all her life, I know that people tell outsiders things they would not tell anyone else. The stakes are low when you leave your secrets with outsiders; they will keep these revelations to themselves and even if they do share them, it won’t be with anyone who matters.
I was on these allotment sites to carry out ethnographic fieldwork, which is predicated on two things. The first is being able to observe, and the second that people will open up to you. It also helps if you have an ‘in’. One of mine is that I grew up around gardens and gardening. I know the language and I have even been known to produce harvests. My other ‘in’ is my African upbringing. In most African cultures, children are trained from a very young age to listen to and engage respectfully with elders. And there is a very special type of elder responsible for the fact that we can still grow at allotment sites across Britain today – the ‘old boys’.
Now, I should say that the term ‘old boy’ is not derogatory. Old boys call themselves and others ‘old boys’, and are special for being the only type of allotmenteer with this kind of specific designation. Mention ‘old boy’ to anyone on an allotment site and they will immediately know who you mean. They are stereotypically white, English and working-class. Perhaps the
sort of man who holds up his trousers with bailer twine and is considered to be (and perhaps considers himself to be) ‘salt of the earth’. Regardless, he certainly commands a particular status on allotment sites. As one old boy, John, told me, ‘Now that I am an old boy, no one can tell me what to do.’ Old boys are revered for their growing knowledge, are understood to hold particular freedoms available to no one else on the site and are slightly feared for their judgements, doled out advisedly. I took it as a compliment when I was told off by one old boy for popping onto the site that morning for only half an hour. There were a clear number of jobs that needed doing but all I could manage on that particular day was a quick water. The ‘old boy’ in question was having none of my ‘better than nothing’ approach. It meant he cared enough about me (or the patch of land I was growing on) to tell me to make the time for it. ‘Seedlings,’ he told me (I was trying to nurture a few), ‘are like babies, you know.’ The old boys’ first allegiance is to the land and the allotment site – your plot and your produce tells them all they need to know – but back in the day there was some resistance as to who was allowed to engage with these spaces in the first place.
On a crisp late autumn afternoon, as we sipped tea in her kitchen, Peggy, now retired, told me about a stereotypical old boy who for a time ran the allotment site where she has had a plot for over forty years. ‘He was a very nice guy,’ she said, ‘but he wasn’t really interested in talking to anyone other than guys.’ Peggy described the difficulty she initially had in securing a plot, being told by him that the site was full. A public-sector worker for decades, Peggy was astute at reading people and immediately sent her husband down to enquire instead. He was immediately given a choice of six plots, selecting the one he thought Peggy would like best. Her husband has never since cultivated the allotment in all the decades they’ve had it, and yet it is his name that has remained on the lease ever since.
If Peggy had told this story before I started my research, I wouldn’t have understood what she said next. ‘You owe a lot to the people who wouldn’t give me an allotment,’ she told me, ‘because actually, one way or another, they kept the sites going. Terrible means they used to do it, and some of them were terrible. Nevertheless, they kept them going.’ And she’s right. During the post-war era, convenience foods had become commonplace and growing your own food was no longer considered a leisure activity. The rising value of urban land coupled with many plots’ disuse and disrepair meant that, in Peggy’s words, ‘Allotments were really disappearing at a huge rate of knots.’ By the sixties, the situation was alarming enough that the government ordered a committee of enquiry.
Harry Thorpe, Professor of Geography at the University of Birmingham at the time, produced a report in the early seventies that proposed a transformation of what he called these ‘horticultural slums’ into leisure gardens. This is part of the reason that the full name of the National Allotment Society remains the National Society for Allotments and Leisure Gardeners. Setting aside Thorpe’s offensive description of allotments, his words had minimal effect on increasing allotment numbers, even as the kinds of reformed spaces he had in mind (though they did perhaps unwittingly predict the gentrification of allotments from the noughties onwards). And so it was left to the old boys to carry out the spadework that has seen allotments survive and go on to thrive in the present day. Their constant daily presence on these plots was the groundwork required to ensure that they did not simply vanish from the British landscape. Sites that were seen as not having active allotmenteering were most vulnerable to being closed down and developed – so many old boys took on an extra plot, some even two or three, to keep sites alive until demand grew.
That’s the thing. In their own ways, these old boys really care – about the land, about growing and about their individual specific interests, liking to connect to people through those interests. But they have to know that those interests matter to you too.
—
