lifeisland – Manor Garden Olympic Allotments

In his thoroughly entertaining book “One Man And His Dig” (‘adventures of an allotment novice’), Valentine Low includes a chapter on Allotments Under Threat. He highlights the relentless pressure on allotment sites all over the country and describes the experiences at East Acton, Eastleigh and Redbridge as well as Manor Gardens. He came along to the last Open Day to give a reading:

When the allotment-holders at Manor Gardens in the East End faced the threat of losing their plots, they were pitted against an opponent even more formidable and intransigent than Colin White and the Hogarth Club (who wanted to build a private health club on 100-year old allotments in East Acton). They were up against the London Development Agency, a body armed with statutory powers and rather more highly paid lawyers than Colin White could ever dream of. Their aims were also rather more significant than just building a health club: as the Mayor of London’s agency for economic growth, they were charged with the task of acquiring the land for the 2012 Olympics – and the allotments were in their way. Trying to get the Manor Gardens Allotment Society to resist the will of the mighty LDA is like putting a small kitten into the ring with Muhammad Ali in his prime; not so much an unfair fight as not really a fight in any normally accepted meaning of the word. But, being typical allotment-holders – obstinate, resolute, and not really impressed with things like money and power, or even expensive lawyers and their big expensive lawyer talk – they decided to have a go anyway.

Until they were cast in their unhappy role as the martyrs of London’s Olympic dream, the Manor Gardens allotments were one of London’s best-kept secrets. Tucked away in the waste­lands of east London, where dual carriageways criss-cross a landscape of factories and warehouses and backstreet breakers’ yards, the allotments are so well hidden that no one would ever stumble across them by chance; even equipped with directions, it is no easy task to find them. In fact the surprise was not so much that the LDA wanted to use the land for the Olympics, but that anyone in authority actually knew that the allotments were there. They looked like an oversight, ignored for years by the outside world and quite happy to remain so – the allotments that time forgot.

To find them, you first had to find the First Capital bus garage on Hackney’s Waterden Road, a bleak industrial no-mans-land, and then Wani’s Cash and Carry warehouse to its right, at which point you might spot that there is a small gateway in the metal fencing which separates the two of them. From there a meandering path takes you to a narrow bridge over the River Lea, up a brief slope and then suddenly you are – well, where? It’s a funny little spit of land between the Lea and the Channelsea River, and you certainly didn’t notice it from the road. You didn’t notice the fig trees, either, or the runner beans or pumpkins, or any of the other wonderful things that people grow up there. You didn’t notice Tom Norris’s shed, with its long row of awards for the prize-winning vegetables he has grown over the years, or Reg cooking up lunch, or John Matheson’s pine tree grown from a seed his son brought back from a holiday in Tunisia some fifteen years ago. No one ever notices the Manor Gardens allotments, but in their rough and ready way they are one of the most charming idylls one could imagine, a rural haven in the midst of some quite staggeringly unprepossessing urban dereliction.

They owe their existence to a philanthropist called Major Arthur Villiers, one of the founders of the Eton Manor Boys’ Club in Hackney Wick, an attempt to bring a bit of public school enlightenment – and football and boxing – to the impoverished youth of the East End. Villiers was a friend of Winston Churchill, and in the allotment hut, hanging above the cushioned bench, there is a group photograph from the early 1900s of them together in military uniform. Some of the older plot-holders remember Villiers visiting the site on his bicycle. ‘He used to come up here on his rusty old bike,’ recalled one old plot-holder, Reg. ‘We would give him a few carrots, or a cabbage. We would say, "Help yourself." If you saw him you would not believe he was an entrepreneur. To put it bluntly, he looked like a bit of a tramp.’ He was very protective of the allotments, though. There is a story that the nearby Oxo factory once wrote to him suggesting they buy a piece of the allotment land so that they could extend the factory; Villiers wrote back suggesting that they sell him the factory so that he could extend the allotments When he died he bequeathed the site as allotments ‘in perpetuity’, telling plot-holders ‘You’ll never be thrown off here you’ll be here for ever’; but perpetuity, it seems, ain’t what it used to be.

The allotments have changed significantly since Villiers’s day. Back then they were solely the province of working-class East Enders, men who saw the chance to spend a few hours at the weekend tending their vegetables as a welcome break from the hard grind on the factory floor; now there are middle-class interlopers, and women, and of course all manner of ethnic minorities – West Indians, Greeks, Turkish Cypriots, Italians. Sam Clark – one half of Sam and Sam Clark, of Moro restaurant – got a plot there a few years ago after hearing about the site from a friend who was a waitress at the River Cafe. ‘Having this allotment made me fall in love again with London,’ he told me. ‘It let us into this multicultural world which was every bit as good as the romance we have sought abroad. It was this fantastic community, very varied; old-fashioned cockneys, and then this wonderful wave of Kurds and Turkish Cypriots. Apart from that there is the growing of some of the best vegetables I have ever grown in my life. Sweetcorn, courgettes, cucumbers, sun­flowers, incredible strawberries, twenty different varieties of tomato, each one with their own personality’ When I asked him what would happen if they lost their battle against the LDA an they were offered an alternative site elsewhere, he sounded so upset it seemed out of the question. ‘The idea of moving somewhere else is too distressing. I don’t think I could move, and a of the people are too old to move.’

He wasn’t the only one. John Day, seventy-seven, a retired Post Office worker, has been going to the allotments for thirty three years. He had one plot, his wife had another, but she died about five years ago, so he just comes up by himself now. He’s big on fruit, is John: there are gooseberries, red and blackcurrants, an apple tree, and cherry plums at the back. ‘I’ve got a freezer full of fruit at home,’ said John. ‘I would be really gutted if this went. This is my summer. It is like the holidays over here. I’ve got a deckchair at home. I bring it over in my car. I sit here and watch it all growing.’ When I met John they were under notice to leave, but still fighting a last-ditch battle to be allowed to stay; inevitably, though, many people had started to let their plots go. John pointed to his neglected strawberry beds. ‘I ‘ll miss that this year. All the pounds of strawberries I used to have off there. Sometimes there were so many you almost thought, no, not another strawberry.’

Perhaps because it is so remote, when people go up to Manor Gardens to visit their plots they tend to make more of a day it than other allotment-holders elsewhere; and when they come they have lunch. Reg and Hassan are famous for their lunch now, cooked on the allotments over a Calor gas stove with whatever ingredients are in season. Reg Hawkins was seventy-five when I met him, a former compositor and graphic designer who has had a plot for fifty-four years; his father had one before him and Reg remembers coming up to help him when he was eight years old. ‘That was what started my passion for gardening,’ said. ‘There is no other place like this. We call it our Shangri-La.’ For the last fifteen years he reckons to have spent just about every day on the allotment. His friend Hassan Ali, a Turk Cypriot, is about ten years younger, a former mechanic, and whenever they are both on the allotment they cook lunch together. Reg has got quite a reputation for his salad nowadays; the recipe has appeared in the Guardian, and also in Sam and Sam Clark’s book Moro East. Reg and Hassan’s culinary fame took off after Rick Stein heard about the food they produced at some allotment barbecue or other – they are a sociable lot at Manor Gardens – and decided to come up to the allotments to make a television programme about their al fresco creations, part of his series Food Heroes. Reg said, ‘Rick Stein said to me, "Where did you learn to make salad like that?" I said, "Hackney Marshes.’"

Here is Reg’s special salad, Hackney Marsh-style. For best results, assemble and consume on an allotment.

4-5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 Cos lettuce, outer leaves removed, cut into 1 cm slice
2
small new season’s onions or spring onions, sliced into thin rings (with a little bit of green stem, too)
2 small red onions, finely chopped
2 beetroots, raw, grated or cut into matchsticks
2 carrots, grated
2 handfuls purslane, chopped roughly 6 cherry tomatoes in quarters or 3 large tomatoes chopped
1 large cucumber, peeled, chopped roughly
1
kohlrabi, grated
2
sweet peppers, green or red, chopped
1-2 fresh chillies (optional)
1 bulb of fennel and leaves, chopped 1 handful sorrel, shredded
3 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley 1 tbsp chopped fresh mint
dressing:
6 tbsp olive oil
juice of 1 lemon or 1 tbsp red wine vinegar sea salt and black pepper

Put all the vegetables in a large salad bowl. Pour over the dressing, season with salt and pepper. The salad will have a purple/red hue from the beetroot.

It is good to have things like that recipe to serve as reminders of Manor Gardens, because the allotments aren’t there any more. The bulldozers came along in 2007 and flattened the place, the first stage of the process of turning it into a walkway for the Olympics. The last time I saw it they were having a summer open day, part of the tireless propaganda campaign they waged against the LDA but also a way of trying to keep their spirits up as they fought a war they were always going to lose. Hassan and Reg cooked up a storm, and Sam and Sam Clark grilled pinchons – delicious little pieces of spicy marinaded pork – and chorizo. Children ran along the paths between allotments playing hide and seek, while a three-legged lurcher trotted about the place, sniffing things in a busy, doggish way.

Perhaps the most heart-breaking thing was to watch people working away on their allotments, painstakingly cultivating ground they knew they were going to lose for ever in a few weeks’ time. I met a teacher called Cynthia, who spent most of the day with her husband Mark working their plot, making it as immaculate as they could get it. ‘Nobody is going to tell me I cannot plant,’ she said with a slightly stroppy smile. ‘My plot is probably tidier now that it has been for years. I’ve got onions in, and potatoes chitting, and I’ve just gone and bought some more seeds. I want it to be looking as good as it can when it finally goes, so that when the builders come and bulldoze it all they feel really guilty.’ As they worked, a friend of theirs called Tracey leaned over the fence to chat to them. She told me proudly about her shed, which had been built by one of her predecessors on the allotment way back in the 1950s and was still going strong. It probably took the bulldozer about eight seconds to reduce it to matchwood.

After they were evicted from Manor Gardens, the allotment-holders were given another site where they could grow their veg; the LDA was at least good for that. It was about a mile away, a place called Marsh Lane Fields in Leyton. It was what was known as Lammas Land, given to commoners in the reign of King Alfred to graze their livestock from 1 August (Lammas Day) until the following spring. Getting the land was a bit of a struggle, though, as the local residents understandably rather resented losing such a sizeable piece of common land. They walked their dogs there, played football and other games and did not see why they should have to hand it over just so a few cabbage-fanciers could carry on growing their own veg instead of buying it at Tesco like normal people. Waltham Forest Council refused planning permission for the proposed allotment site, and for a while it looked as if the plot-holders would not have a home to go to at all. The LDA reapplied for planning permission, did a rather better job of buttering up the council and was eventually granted permission. The plot-holders – organised by a rather doughty campaigner called Julie Sumner – also managed to wring one more concession out of the LDA, being allowed to stay on at Manor Gardens until the growing season was over and the Marsh Lane site was ready.

So, in theory, everyone should have been happy: the LDA got their land for the Olympics, and the allotment people got somewhere to grow their vegetables. But Manor Gardens – the trees, the landscape, the wildlife, everything that made it special – they are all gone. The sheds too; the plot-holders will just have to start again, but then allotment folk are good at that. When I was writing this I presumed – prompted, I suppose, by that remark by Sam Clark – that many of the older boys would not be taking up the offer of a new plot. They would be getting on in years, and probably would not feel like starting all over again from scratch, and anyway the new place wouldn’t really feel the same. Just to be sure I rang up the chairman of the association, John Matheson, to check. Was Reg going to move to Marsh Lane, I asked? Oh yes, he said, and so would John Day, and Tom Norris, who had had a plot for sixty years and was, at eighty-four, the oldest member of the association; he was looking forward to making a new start, apparently.

With so many allotments disappearing as a result of the ever-increasing demand for new housing – in the case of Manor Gardens one of the Olympic ‘legacy benefits’ is claimed to be thousands of new houses – this quote sums how many of us feel:

Are we going to carry on building houses all over England until the last sod has been paved over? There are, after all, other things in life just as important as the provision of bricks and mortar – health, well-being, social cohesion, self-sufficiency, taking responsibility for what you eat, even maintaining some kind of link with the land. These are all important considerations, and if we lose the ability to grow what we eat, we lose a vital part of what it is to be human and become little better than battery animals, passively consuming whatever slop our masters choose to feed us. So, no, I don’t feel particularly reasonable about it, and should anyone ever have the temerity to try to build over my allotment, I will chain myself to the bulldozer and not move until they drag my lifeless body away.

Valentine Low’s “One Man and His Dig” is published by Pocket Books ISBN 978-1-84739-128-5

Comments RSS