lifeisland – Manor Garden Olympic Allotments

The award-winning Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva, came to visit us while making the London’s Gardens: Allotments for the People feature (follow link to listen) for their popular “Hidden Kitchens” slot on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition”. We were delighted to be featured in this very well-produced story which went out on 27th [...]

Following the recommendations of the consultants’ report, work has been going on this week to attempt to ease the waterlogging problems on 9 of the worst affected plots at the Marsh Lane allotment site.

If you live within reach of the Olympic park and have ever thought about getting an allotment plot, you can help our campaign by registering your interest through our survey.
We believe that substantial areas of allotments will be the best possible use of the land that will be available in the Olympic Legacy Park post-2012, [...]

Jan Stradtmann’s photographs of eerily lit sheds at the Manor Gardens site were taken in the last months of public access to the site. 6 months later, all trace had been erased, the soil itself being removed in the symbolic cleansing of the area of every sign of history or previous human activity.
The freshfacedandwildeyed08 New [...]

Ali Qasim’s documentary of the last months of the original Manor Gardens, first shown on the Community Channel in November 2007, can now be viewed online here
It’s due to be shown again on Community Channel on Tue 24 Jun at 10:35am.

By the end of November 2007, less than a month after the new allotment site was occupied, it became clear there were problems with the site. Much of it was extremely hard to dig, vegetables struggled to grow or rotted, and plots became dramatically waterlogged after rain. Before long the soil began to smell rancid. [...]