A cabbage costs $2.40, so Britons dig again

Press, 11 April 1979, Page 9

A cabbage costs $2.40, so Britons dig again

NZPA London Britons are growing their own food again with the fervour they adopted during war — this time the enemy is inflation.

The cost of food has risen by 190 per cent in the last decade, bringing the present price of an average cabbage to $2.40. This has led to a campaign for cultivation of the country’s 65,000 hectares (160,000 acres) of derelict land, much of it lying rubble-strewn and overgrown while developers decide what to do with it. Conservationists are pressing for a greater use of the grassy embankments alongside the thousands of kilometres of railway tracks. People are again clamouring for the plots of land first set aside for the “labouring poor” more than a century ago.

Landowners handed out these plots as compensation for fencing off vast areas of common land under the notorious enclosure acts of the 17th and 18th centuries.

After a hard day’s toil, labourers would trudge off to the edges of towns and villages to cultivate food to supplement their diets on what they called their allotments.

At the turn of the century, local councils took over the administration of these allotments, made them available to all, and attempted to save them from being buried under cement.

Many were snapped up by builders outbidding each other for the prime pieces of real estate gradually being surrounded by houses. Only 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of allotments are left, a huge reduct ; on in the area once under cultivation.

Inflation . biting hard, ■bout 120.000 pf’ople are on’ council waiting lists for one

of the regulation-size 300 sq m plots.

It is just a question of waiting ior plot-holders to die, injure their backs and retire, or give up with the realisation that not everything planted actually comes up.

The demand for allotments has always been an indicator of the economy and mood of Britain. In the so-called swinging sixties thousands of these precious plots were lying untilled and forgotten. It was then that developers came up with offers councils could not refuse.

A spokeman for Sutton’s, one of the largest seed merchants in the country, said: “There has almost been a wartime swing back to vegetable growing in the mid-seventies.”

There is not quite the urgency of wartime, when even the Royal parks were ploughed up and turned over to vegetable growing, but the demand is there.

Gardening in Britain is considered a growth industry, and last year Sutton’s sold 37M packets of seed to people tired of queuing up at greengrocers’ shops.

The social stigma of having an allotment has vanished, but the principle remains the same: growing food to avoid buying it. There is also the therapeutic value of being able to slip out of the house for a few hours quiet meditation behind a row of beans. Research has shown that only four per cent of allotment holders are women.

The main attraction is that one allotment can produce $260 worth of fruit and vegetables each year for a rent of about $lO.

Britain could grow an extra million tonnes of vegetables, worth about S24OM by taking over derelict land. ! This is the estimate of the Friends of the Earth conservation group, alarmed

that agricultural land is being gobbled up for housing at the rate of 120,000 hectares a year. The group wants the Gbvernment to requisition designated building land which has lain vacant for five years. The idea is that people will be moved in to cultivate the land for at least four vears.

They W'ould be given notice" to move off when a landowner made it clear that building work was ready to begin.

Conservationists also have their sights set on the wastelands of coal yards made redundant when steam trains were phased out.

Thousands of acres Of trackside are already producing prime turnips, cabbages, and potatoes. Take the train north out of London’s King’s Cross Station, and as it gathers speed one of the finest crops of beet in the land comes into view. British Railways are loath to free more vacant land. They fear for the safety Of gardeners who, laden with hoes and forks, would have to pick their way across electrified tracks. Allotment holders often feel they could use a little of the "electricity to feed through the wire fencing round their plots. Some look like prisoner-of-war camps keeping at bay those not averse to helping themselves to a free bunch of carrots.

There are “grow it yourself’ schemes in other parts of the world, but these are mostly neatly-edged and manicured “leisure gardens,” places where the family go to picnic. None has the ramshackle appearance and historical development of British allotments.

The theory is that they go some way towards satisfying a peasant urge among Britons, the first people to be thrust suddenly and un- : wittingly into the Industrial I Revolution.