The British allotment has undergone an extraordinary evolution. It existed centuries before Peter Rabbit narrowly escaped the vengeful spade of Mr. McGregor, for its ancestor, ‘the enclosures’, were born out of the marshy Eastern fens drained by our 18th-century Georgian cousins. Famously, it was a symbol of robust nationhood found throughout Imperial Britain in WWI and, later, a badge of honour crafted onto A4 carboard posters in the Second World War, weathered on the cast iron Victorian lampposts. Today, the allotment personifies the modernisation of the urban civil landscape, narrating the story of a terrain that once churned out a colossal 1.4 million vegetable gardens, to where it is today, a landscape redundant to monotonous parkland.
Peter Rabbit
It has a particular biosphere, bringing together plants and people who wouldn’t otherwise meet. The allotment is a marvellous environmental indicator, home to thousands of species, a particularly precious habitat for the bumble bee which pollinates as it hops across city gardens. Unfortunately, allotments represent a conflict in land use, for the desired space to home 20 gardens is land that councils are compelled to delegate to housing developments. Modern urban expansion has contributed to the UK’s biodiversity loss crisis, and while allotment gardens are recognised as vital wildlife hotspots, miniature expansions of existing green infrastructure cannot outcompete depleting ecological abundance.
It is a misfortunate phenomenon that, while allotment gardening is on its knees, food insecurity in British cities is on the rise, spurred by geopolitics, cost-of-living, and the omnipresent battle against climate change. Recent data revealed that 8.8% of UK households are moderately or severely food insecure by FAO standards (Goudie, 2022; FAO, 2022) – this temporarily reached 13.8% in April 2022 (Food Foundation). In essence, the neglect of allotment gardening in the modern age tells us much about the co-evolution of food-production and ecological decline.
Before we mock our predecessors, the mistakes made in urban planning are mistakes that we too may be mocked for. The history of the allotment imparts a large lesson of political humility and environmental stewardship for we barely understand the extraordinary phenomena of allotment-keeping and how it may optimally serve both humans and nature. Through engaging with the history of allotment gardening during crisis-times, we can reveal that modern urban allotments can operate on the frontline of two major sustainability crises: urban food insecurity and biodiversity loss.
Britain Today
‘Sustainability’ in the generic sense, is the equal balance of social and economic prosperity without breaching planetary environmental boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009). It is therefore also regarded as the recognition of interdependency between resilient food production and a healthy ecosphere (Ericksen et al., 2010). The Government’s Climate Change Risk Assessment recognised that the resilience of UK food systems depends on ‘the stewardship of natural resources’ (HM Government, 2017). Parliamentary data (see below) shows that the UK spent £11 billion on fruit and vegetable imports in 2019, disproportionately importing far more than it exported in comparison to other food types (Finlay and Ward, 2020). This suggests the UK’s food supply-chain for this sector is vastly unsustainable and vulnerable to international volatile markets.
(Source: Finlay and Ward, 2020, 'Food Security')
Today, deprived urban dwellers are the most vulnerable to precipitating food prices induced by climate change because livelihood impacts are more critically acute for individuals who are socially isolated and lack access to adequate urban infrastructure (Mbow et al., 2019; Gasper et al., 2011). As climate change worsens, it will exacerbate food insecurity for disadvantaged communities. The UK ecological crisis in cities is best represented through biodiversity loss; Governmental research has estimated that the proportion of green areas in urban environments has declined from 63% to 55% since 2001 (Environment Agency, 2021) and, since 1990 2 million acres of grassland was lost to urban and woodland expansion (Environmental Audit Committee, 2021). Allotments provide part of the solution to both these issues through providing wildlife havens for pollinating and migrating species and offering cheap nutritional food supply.
The issue of urban food insecurity and ecological degradation are closely tied. The second UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2 ‘zero hunger’), frames food security and ecological sustainability as synchronously requiring ‘transformative’ political and economic change (UN, 2015; Blesh et al., 2019). Target 2.4, to ‘ensure sustainable food production systems’ that ‘help maintain ecosystems’, suggests integrating strategies across multiple sustainability issues can concurrently build ecosystem resilience while securing quality food production (Mbow et al., n.d). Through including ecological sustainability targets in the overall effort to reduce food insecurity, policies recognise that current food consumption patterns threaten critical ecosystem functions on which food production depends (Blesh et al., 2019).
The multifunctionality of allotment gardens as a nature-based solution to many sustainability issues is well known. They contribute to water regulation, temperature regulation, provide wildlife habitats, create leisure opportunities, foster cultural identity, and provide cheap nutritious food (Cabral et al., 2017). Despite this, scholars attempting to address food insecurity generally do not link ecology with policy or nutritional sciences (Blesh et al., 2019). It is on this basis that food insecurity and biodiversity loss may simultaneously be reduced, for its human and non-human residents, on the allotment frontier. This ambition hinges on an improved urban allotment policy, and for inspiration, we turn back the clock 80 years.
Proud owner of a central London allotment, C.1970, Manor Gardens
WWII and the 'Dig for Victory'
In times of crisis, the British allotment has a track record of supplying the nation with nutritious fruit and vegetables, curbing otherwise skyrocketing food insecurity. Before WWII detrimentally fractured the food supply to the British Isles, Britain’s food consumption constituted 70% of global imports (Ginn, 2012). However, once war struck, shipping was severely restricted, and the population was forced into a hasty period of agronomic adaptation. Although food insecurity became a fundamental threat to civil society, the Dig for Victory campaign promoted allotment gardening and decreased the dependency on food imports by half (RTA, 2019). The domestic allotment became an icon for British urban agriculture and an arbitrary unit of the self-sufficiency of urban communities. In the years preceding the war, allotment garden numbers wavered around 800,000 but astronomically boomed to 1.4 million with large credit to the Government’s ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign (Barthel et al., 2013).
Articulated below are a few thoughts on how WWII effectively mobilised a population to plough their gardens in the name of sustainability.
1. The Physical Environment
‘Dig for Victory’ was both an imperative and metaphor. The injunction to ‘dig’ demands immediate action and simultaneously calls upon an autonomous population ready to serve the country (Rivlin, 2014; Ginn, 2012). The instruction necessitated frugality, a virtue associated with the earth, and presented the allotment as a frontier for war. The phrase is an appropriated symbol of home front patriotism (Bramall, 2013), and evokes notions of triumph which feed into a trope of ‘togetherness’ (Ginn, 2012:300). Symbolically, ‘Dig for Victory’ likens spades with swords, the home front with the battlefront, and is both a tangible instruction and an aspiration. To individuals, their work felt indispensable and ‘vital’ to the war effort.
The Dig for Victory’ campaign title represented far more than the imperative to grow, cultivate, and consume home-grown produce. It embodied organicist ideas about English nationalism which brought together concerns with labour, soil, and landscape in conservative visions of Englishness (Ginn, 2012).
Without getting too technical, WWII allotments encouraged populations to (literally) dig for victory through empowering them with a collective sense of responsibility to (1) protect the nation and (2) help each other. It achieved this by emphasising the physical landscape and gave British citizens a grounded sense of pride that did not wholly rely on abstract notions such as liberty or religion.
Like international war, food insecurity and biodiversity are relatively abstract notions because they are not necessarily visible elements of daily life. Both are at least partly defined through a distinct absence of phenomenon, for example, lack of money or lack of hedges, trees, bees etc. To effectively increase uptake in vegetable growth, then individuals should be made aware of the importance of their actions through depictions in the physical landscape or, at least, engage with a daily rhetoric of sustainable gardening.
WWII Dig for Victory poster, 1942, printer: J. Weiner Ltd. Artist: Unknown
2. Community
Allotment gardening in the war was a social enterprise and community-specific rituals caused individuals to have deep-seated bonds with their allotments and neighbours. Many a 1940s town celebrated the efforts of it's individuals through festivals and award ceremonies. 1st prizes for the largest carrot or shiniest apple were distributed to celebrate the layman's efforts and encourage more to garden. Collectively shared identities lead to cultural change in the Second World War because social norms mediated conforming behaviour (Nettle, 2014; Bramall, 2013). Through creating cultures of positivity surrounding dialogue associated with the garden, communities praised those who worked to reduce their burden on the national food spply, and frowned upon those who over consumed. Engaging with the black market, for example, was a highly allusive affair. Fairness and equality were highly regarded social virtues and anyone who undermined the 'fair shares for all' mantra underpinning consumer regulation was deemed selfish and unethical (Roodhouse, 2006; Willmott and Davis, 2016). The 'long-term effectiveness of rules' depends on a community's 'willingness' to monitor each other (Ostrom, 2009).
School boys doing their fair share of allotment gardening. Source: The Times, July 29 2013 issue
3. Education
Gardening in the 1940s was a communal affair. Everyone was well versed in the lessons of the soil. Children at school embarked on curriculums of how to farm the school playing fields and mentorship training, where experienced gardeners teach the inexperienced, is vital for the transmission of tacit knowledge (Barthel et al., 2013b). Such educational practices leads to ‘topophilia’ (person-place bonding) and reinforces inter-relational processes which can go onto facilitate asocial forms of learning. For example, trial-and-error style gardening is a self-actualising process and such asocial interaction with social-ecological systems lead to profound detailed understandings of those environments which one cannot gain solely through oral communication alone.
External media sources, such as media produced by the government, also served as a medium of education such as leaflets, radio shows, and posters. Although, only 40% of gardeners were delivered cropping advice leaflets, only 10% of them used them to guide their practice (Ginn, 2012). Regardless, the point here is that the media perpetuated social norms regarding gardening methods, and such rules provided a social structure for participation (e.g framing norms for cooperation between gardeners). On the whole, overt or implicit modes of education contributed to nationwide environmental management systems as well as improved understanding of the necessity of sustainable allotment gardening.
Education on the allotment is a self-fulfilling prophecy so long as people are engaging. Other than a more formal curriculum-based approach to education, which isn't necessarily the most practical due to unequal access to allotment sites across urban areas, increased regular participation across the community is favourable. Education, ideally from multiple sources as described above, is therefore inter-dependent on policy and cultural change.
‘It was the first-time dad had grown vegetables but there were always the other gardeners who gave advice’
Brenda Millward's contribution to the BBC WWII People's War archive: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/67/a1300267.shtml>
‘Recipes were published by the Ministry of Food which used the excess vegetables in rather unusual ways... carrot marmalade was not one of the nation's favourites’
Joyce Harris's contribution to the BBC WWII People's War archive: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/55/a5203955.shtml>
4. Legacy
Members of the WWII contemporary community often displayed rituals and habits associated with resilience building. These were sometimes presented as pragmatic acts of foresight or habitual mindsets associated with regular exposures to ‘new’ experiences and ‘get-stuck-in’ attitudes. We can consider rituals as ’inventions’ which were designed to sustain communities through the creation of new realities (Misztal, 2003). For example, acts of foresight were commonplace as families anticipated, planned, and routinely worried about future sources of food. In turn, this contributed to resilience building through avoiding overconsumption in times of low productivity.
Habits are passed through communities in ‘non-textual and non-cognitive ways’ (Misztal,2003). This has the potential to create positive feedback loops, such as emphasis on the value gained from new experiences. In terms of legacy building, these attitudes can benefit communities through opening up individuals to exploring innovation and preventing them from becoming ‘locked-in’ to rigid maladaptive behaviour (Barthel et al 2010.) Essentially building up a generalised form of resilience over generations (Nykvist and Von Heland, 2010) was at the forefront of contemporary rhetoric.
Harnessing our own modern rhetoric around discussions on slowing down climate change for the sake of future generations certainly relates to this discussion. The UN, alongside other international and national sustainability conversations, emphasise the intra-generational responsibilities of modern governments when crafting sustainability policy. Given the overwhelming emotional response by war-time individuals to protect the lives of yet-to-be-born Englishmen, and how this materialised on the home-front, I think it’s fair to suggest we can take a leaf out of the Dig for Victory playbook.
What Now?
Innovation occurs through large cohorts challenging long-established ideas of ‘the city’ (such as for what and for whom it exists) (Barthel et al., 2013b). Whether it was knowingly or not, participants in the Dig for Victory fostered a strong sense of environmental stewardship using the tools and rhetoric discussed above. Likewise, today, it is critically important to broadcast the value of holism in managing social-ecological systems (Berkes and Folke, 1998) and to iterate that human relations to non-humans are fluid (Grosinger et al., 2022). It’s not the individual responsibility, rather a concerted national effort to raise a dialogue around the symbiotic nature of greenness and secure food sources.
As a cohort, we don't have a bounty of time to garden, or money to contribute to allotment societies. Nevertheless, take time to think about how your local greenspace (or absence thereof) is connected to the wider green network of your town. Try to re-imagine the urban allotment garden - which local spaces could it fill. Vertical gardens, work-place roof allotments, roadside herb gardens. Consider what would incentivise you to engage. Expensive 250 square meter plots are yesterdays news, councils don't have the money or will to dedicate large plots of land to allotments. However, it is visible in how we spend our time and expend our energy, where our priorities lie - this is the truest indication of our values. So, what do we really want to do?
Written by Beatrix Knight
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