Town & Country Planning, May 2011
I don’t read Country Life very often. It is one of those magazines which I might enjoy but which gives off an aura which suggests it isn’t for me. Still I did a double take when I saw the cover this month, with the headline ‘How to keep goats’.
This seems to be, at the very least, rather hands-on for Country Life. How to employ someone to keep goats for you, maybe – even how my ancestors kept goats – but to do it yourself? It doesn’t quite go with deb of the month.
It reminded me that, last year, an attractive young lady asked my advice about how to start a goat farm. I hadn’t the foggiest, but it made me aware that the new 20-something generation of radicals tends to regard the task ahead as including growing or rearing.
It is hard to think of another generation which set out with that conviction since the days of Morris and Ruskin in the 1890s, when radicalism – including the TCPA – often seemed to involve going back to the land.
That same decade we got our first piece of allotments legislation, thanks to Joseph Chamberlain’s radicals in alliance with Lord Salisbury’s Conservatives. Things look different a century and a decade later, but allotments are political again.
You hear stories of 40-year waiting lists for allotments in London, when – even a few years ago – many of them were overgrown and rather on the way out. For the first time since the Second World War, UK seed companies are selling more vegetable seeds than flower seeds.
The allotments that almost surround my house in south London are producing a whole range of products from honey to wind energy. Something is in the air.
I have been wondering quite where this explosion of interest in local food came from. Perhaps it is the Slow Food movement, which emerged out of the Italian communist party in the 1990s. Perhaps it is the Community Supported Agriculture movement, which emerged – almost simultaneously – from a much more conservative Japan or New England.
Wherever it came from, there are parts of the UK now, and certainly parts of the north east United States – like Vermont – where the revolution is obvious just from a gentle drive. There are the small-holdings, the new generation of grocers, the linked food businesses supplying schools, in what is fast becoming an economic revolution too.
It is in its earliest stages but my sense is that this is a major trend, a demand for authentic food, clawing back some control over the big food systems which seemed about to drive out everything else – and may still do.
The group of people who haven’t yet grasped the significance of all this is politicians, which is how I assume the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles could have made the fundamental error of suggesting repealing the Allotments and Smallholdings Act of 1908.
This is the law which forces local authorities to provide allotments to anyone who wants one. It isn’t exactly honoured these days, or the waiting lists would not exist, but without it the fear is that cash-strapped local authorities will descend on the allotments and sell them off.
He is suggesting this in the name of localism, and rolling back all those laws which tie the hands of local councillors. But to do so just when he has front-loaded some pretty extreme spending cuts does not look like localism at all.
In any event, I believe this kind of measure is trumped by a more important kind of localism – the drive to rebuild local life and diversity, support more independent, thriving local economies and value the historic diversity which has been swept so damagingly away.
In any case, the 1908 Act is one of those pieces of Liberal legislation, one of the first by the Asquith government, which I believe Liberal Democrats would repeal over their dead bodies.
My sense is that any attempt to sell off allotment land would make the forest sell-off seem like a vicarage tea party. The words were only out of Pickles’ mouth before the Independent was planning a national campaign.
My local allotment doesn’t just make a difference to local health, and potentially at least to the local economy, it is a hugely successful experiment in multi-racial co-operation. The business of closing it would be painful and desperate.
Which is why I decided to write about allotments this month, and presumably why Greg Clark, Pickles’ junior minister, is now talking about finding ways of providing more allotments – a handbrake turn if ever there was one.
I don’t pretend to know how both those statements could come simultaneously out of the Department for Communities. But if Clark is serious, he needs to have a word with the Transition Towns movement.
While local authorities find it increasingly hard to find more land for people to grow things, the Transition Towns do seem to manage – by subtle negotiation with landowners – to find more space.