lifeisland – Manor Garden Olympic Allotments

In the first week of November plotholders were finally able to move in and try to start new gardens on the bare new site at Marsh Lane, Waltham Forest – formerly a horse-grazed meadow valued by locals. Most had to give up their plots on the Olympic site in July, abandoning valuable mature fruit trees, [...]

Allotment gardener and Evening Standard report Valentine Low has reviewed Thomas Pausz’s Community Shed reconstruction on his blog, ‘One Man and his Dig’.
It has a photo of the recreated shed, and the story of how Thomas discovered Manor Gardens – after wandering in and getting locked inside. At the time he didn’t encounter the fabled [...]

From The Guardian, 2 Nov 2007
Samuel and Samantha Clark, the couple behind the London restaurant Moro, grew everything from chard to chilli on their East End allotment. They tell Jon Henley about the joy of growing your own food.

Sam and Sam Clark of Moro

MEDITATIONS ON THE MANOR GARDEN ALLOTMENTS
From the catalogue accompanying Julian Perry’s – A Common Treasury : The Sheds Lost to the Olympiad at Austin/Desmond
On Wednesday 6 July 2005 the President of the International Olympic Committee announced that London had won its bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games. The nation duly rejoiced as Tony Blair [...]

The best we can do is store your plants and trees, says the Mayor
In a brief exchange with London Assembly Member Peter Hulme Cross last week (see full text at the end of this post), the unfortunate Mayor Livingstone tried to explain how constructing an Olympic Park round a little allotment site seems to present [...]

“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…”
“…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 [...]

Thanks to everyone who has submitted objections to the planning applications and requested more time to view them. Today, George Monbiot comments on the inaccessible documents:
“East Londoners are told the games will be good for them, yet it has been made almost impossible for them to have their say…”
The Guardian

by David Mackay – architect for Barcelona’s Olympic Village and Port and co-author of the pre-Olympic masterplan for the Lower Lea Valley

The 2.5 km x 1 km.Olympic Box that lies between the A12 to the north and the A118 to the south, and stretches from one side to the other of the Lower Lea [...]