lifeisland – Manor Garden Olympic Allotments

SAVE OUR SHEDS
HUON MALLALIEU laments the loss of thriving allotments to the Olympics, commemorated in a poignant exhibition.

Getting back to nature: Vine Shed.
Julian Perry’s selling exhibition of shed oil paintings captures the resourcefulness of gardeners

It is inevitable as it is ironic that the first casualty of Olympic Park project should be the peoples gardens. The 75-plot Manor Gardens Allotments in Hackney Wick have been deemed unsightly by the supposedly green Olympic Games organisers and so they must go, to be replaced by a sterile open space and a zigzag concrete path between sporting venues.

At a mere century, the Manor Gardens are not old in allotment terms – the provision of plots for the urban poor can be traced back to Elizabethan times, the Commonwealth and the Restoration – and were originally a gesture of aristocratic philanthropy. In 1900, the owner of the manor, Hackney Wick, was Major Arthur Villiers, a son of the Earl of Jersey and a director of Barings Bank. He gave the land in perpetuity to be used by East End families, and some of the current allotment-holders have been there for half a century. The surrounding area is a wasteland – car breakers’ yards, decayed warehouses, a long-demolished greyhound stadium, a bus depot, scrub and rubbish – but these few acres are a joyous lung of blossom, fruit and vegetables.

Anything goes: Greenhouse Shed displays a hotchpotch of materials

Letting the light flood in: Greenhouse Shed from the South

Nowadays, there is a fine social, economic, generational and racial mix, and as Sam Clark, holder of a Manor Gardens plot as well as the owner of the excellent Moro Restaurant, says: ‘It’s an incredibly special and romantic place. I’ve had some of the best fruit and vegetables ever from here.’

A truly Green suggestion by another plotholder, Julie Sumner, an antenatal course supervisor in the NHS proposed a novel form of sponsorship: the plots could feed the athletes of one national team. ‘It would have to be a very small country with not too many participants, but we probably have enough of a selection to keep anyone happy and fit, no matter where they’re from.’ Naturally, this was rejected by the Olympic Committee.

It is not only the land that will be lost, but also some excellent examples of a genuinely folk art form. The heart of an allotment is very often its shed, which seems to have grown up as organically as the produce. Luckily, those destroyed at Manor Gardens will live on in mainstream art in single and diptych panel paintings by Julian Perry, part of his ‘Olympic Record’ project capturing the transformation of the area in the way of an official war artist.

His exhibition of shed paintings, ‘A Common Treasury’, will be at Austin/Desmond, Pied Bull Yard, 68-69 Great Russell Street, London WC1 (www.austindesmond.com 0207242 4443) from October 17 to November 16. The title is taken from the Levellers’ millenarian manifesto of 1649 : ‘the great creator Reason made the Earth to be a Common Treasury’ – and the show complements Perry’s earlier projects in the Lea Valley and Epping Forest. His intense, haunting work fits the mood of the 17th century idealists, and the Dutch landscapists of the same period, notably Hobbema and Ruysdael, but often with an added dash of wit. He has taken the sheds to his heart, seeing in them ‘an alternative to supermarkets, food miles and landfill sites of waste packaging’.

Do go to the show, and ponder the further costs of this Olympic posturing.

COUNTRY LIFE • SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

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