At first glance, the humble allotment might seem like a minor footnote in Britain’s sprawling social history – not quite as central as trade unions, or as romanticised as working men’s clubs. Often situated on land considered unsuitable for anything else – railway sidings, flood plains, or council-owned peripheral strips – allotments appear, spatially and politically, to occupy the margins.
But that would be a mistake. The rise and steady collapse – and now tentative revival – of the allotment movement mirrors broader shifts in our political economy and civic life. For those of us interested in ‘associational life’ and the changing nature of collective organisation, the history of allotments and their national body, the National Allotment Society (NAS), offers insight into the strengths and vulnerabilities of grassroots membership organisations.
Allotments emerged during a period of profound social transformation. The 1887 Allotments Act – officially “An Act to facilitate the provision of Allotments for the Labouring Classes” – required local authorities to provide land for cultivation, though only where demand existed. Councils were reluctant. So the 1907 Smallholdings and Allotments Act introduced stronger obligations, and remains on the statute books today. If six or more people requested plots, the local council had to act.
But the real explosion came in wartime. Under the 1916 Defence of the Realm Act, councils could requisition land for food production. By 1918, 5,000 new plots had been created across 26 local authorities. The numbers surged again during and immediately after WWII, reaching a high point of 1.4 million plots. But by the 1970s, these had been cut by two-thirds, as mass-produced food and new housing developments took precedence.
By the late 1990s, demand had dipped to the point where 16% of the UK’s 265,000 remaining plots were sitting vacant.
That trend has reversed sharply. As of 2023, the NAS estimates that there are around 330,000 allotment plots in the UK – a modest increase, but what’s more telling is the scale of unmet demand. A 2023 study by the Association for Public Service Excellence found that:
This, despite councils splitting larger plots to increase supply. Allotments have quietly become one of the most in-demand, least disruptive forms of land use in British public life. Planning applications in 2023 included over 100 new housing developments with integrated allotment sites – a development that would have been unthinkable two decades ago.
The current picture is one of contrast: a movement growing in popularity, but under-resourced and politically uninfluential. The majority of allotment land remains council-owned, with voluntary site committees handling the administration. With external pressures on land, there’s definitely a key role for the national association and local allotment holders to become more organised, such as exploring opportunities for Community Asset Transfer from local authorities to community groups, which would enable greater community control over sites and bypass the ‘two-tier’ management system; and to encourage charities and associations to buy land for allotments – like the charity Green Allotments, which buys land with the purpose of creating not-for-profit private allotment sites. In 2009, the National Trust also pledged to create up to 1,000 new plots for use as allotments or community gardens, reviving abandoned kitchen gardens and making use of vacant land on or near their sites. It’s not clear whether they succeeded but, by 2012, they were a third of the way there, having partnered with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘match-making’ initiative for would-be growers and those with land (Landshare, which closed in 2016). A similar initiative spearheaded by a large national association could help to reduce the pressure on local authorities, bring down waiting lists, and extend the breadth of available sites.
Allotments have a reputation of being managed by retired elderly gentlemen – the “cloth-capped plot-holder” – in Colin Ward and David Crouch’s phrase. But a recent survey of the city’s allotments – The Changing Face of Allotments: Findings from a Comprehensive Birmingham Study by Jon Bloomfield and David Draycott – provides a snapshot of shifting demographics:
But austerity has taken a toll. Where Birmingham once employed five officers to manage its 7,000+ plots, it now has just 0.6 of a full-time equivalent post. As Bloomfield and Draycott observe in their study: “The allotment movement has substantial potential but it remains a neglected backwater.” But it’s a question of who is going to give it the attention it deserves.
What makes allotments so rich – and so underexplored – is that they sit at the junction of several traditions: mutual aid, self-help, and labour organising. Colin Ward, a major figure in British anarchist thought – and co-author of The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture – saw them as a rare expression of self-managed, non-hierarchical community space, uniquely positioned between the individual and the collective.
Plots are often individually cultivated, but site governance, land tenure, and external representation are collective, mainly through mutual societies. This produces recurring tensions with public authorities: Who owns the land? Who gets a say in decisions? What happens when plots are sold off?
And aesthetically, too, allotments have become politicised terrain. Part of Ward’s and Crouch’s book challenges the recommendations from the Thorpe Report (1968-1969) – which proposed adopting the Scandinavian model of “leisure gardens” complete with summerhouses and social facilities. In this model, they feared the creeping influence of “municipal tidiness” and a drift away from working-class traditions of frugality, utility, and improvisation. “The allotment,” they wrote, “is one of the last bastions beyond the reach of the professional designer.” In our current era of civic entrepreneurialism where the professional ethos is inescapable, this critique is more relevant than ever.
“We aren’t willing to subscribe enough to run our own affairs efficiently.” These were the words from a resolution at the 1986 conference of the NAS. But, unsurprisingly, it’s an issue for almost all membership organisations who charge membership fees to cover their core costs.
In the Thorpe Report, the author stresses that the NAS’s “absurdly low” fee did not simply restrict its ability to “serve its members”, but also had a damaging symbolic effect:
Even in a more affluent society, the question of membership subscription still seems to suffer from a lack of attention, and it’s clear that citizens are still not convinced by the financial (and social) demands of collective institutions. For a revival of associational life – from the allotment to the workplace – we evidently need to develop far more effective arguments about what we can achieve through democratically funded organisations across civil society.
Perhaps most importantly, allotments have become a contested space – not just for land, but for identity. Who is the ‘typical’ allotment holder today? Is the movement about food security, leisure, sustainability, community, or resistance to enclosure? These aren’t rhetorical questions – they shape funding decisions, planning regulations, and public perception.
And with older people still overrepresented in tenancy data, there are unresolved generational challenges. Leisure gardens – once maligned – might actually offer routes to broader inclusion, particularly among younger people and families.
As JC Niala points out in ‘Banal Utopia’, an afterword to the 2023 reissue of The Allotment, the Covid-19 pandemic drew attention to the stark reality for those without gardens or access to outdoor space, and the uneven distribution of this green space: according to Natural England survey data, Black people are nearly four times as likely as White people in England to have no outdoor space at home. During the pandemic, allotments – low-cost, a permitted outdoor activity, and an escape – became a “coveted prize”. In Niala’s city of Oxford, where in less well-off areas a number of allotments had already closed due to lack of use, waiting lists suddenly shot back up.
That demand continues, but so too do the strains on council resources and targets. In 2023, a study by Searchland calculated that England’s 4,554 allotment sites covered roughly 44.4 million square metres – enough land to accommodate over 200,000 new homes. That figure, though mostly theoretical, puts pressure on councils as they try to balance housing targets with environmental and social infrastructure.
Since the inclusion of allotments in the national planning policy framework, the rate of sell-offs has slowed. But the danger remains: privately owned sites are still being lost, often quietly, to development.
The challenge, then, is about more than soil and spades. It’s about redefining the relationship between individual and collective ownership – introducing more shared infrastructure, resourcing member support, and asserting the political significance of these ‘modest’, and associational, spaces.
If the allotment movement has a future – and it very likely does – it will depend on its ability to reclaim the radical roots that first gave it life, while evolving to meet the demands of a far more complex, and crowded, civic landscape.
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Read More: ‘A quiet revolution’: a review of The Allotment by Colin Ward and David Crouch Review by Sol Perez-Martinez (STIR Issue #44, Winter 2024)
