United Kingdom — From the Memory of the Allotment to Today's Urban Farms

The United Kingdom is perhaps one of the countries that has, for the longest time anywhere in the world, held the culture of growing food within the city as an institution. At its centre is the allotment. This arrangement — by which citizens rent a small plot from the local authority or others and grow vegetables and flowers with their own hands — reaches back to nineteenth-century poor relief and still survives nationwide, underwritten by statute. So when one speaks of this country's urban farming, looking only at new rooftop gardens and community gardens reveals only half the picture. Behind it lies a long history in which the relationship between land and people has been reassembled again and again in response to society's great upheavals — enclosure, the Industrial Revolution and two wars.

This report takes the view of turning over those strata of history one layer at a time. Why did an 'edible town' movement emerge in a small town like Todmorden? Why is a therapeutic garden in London written into a medical prescription? Why does Glasgow go to the trouble of turning stalled development sites into citizens' gardens? None of these questions can be answered by present-day institutions or fashions alone. The memory of the allotment, the legacy of the welfare state, the vacant lots left after austerity — only by going back in time does it become clear why each site 'is where it is'. To read the history is to read this country's urban farming.

Our database currently holds about six UK cases. Geographically, four are concentrated in London, with the small Pennine town of Todmorden and Scotland's largest city, Glasgow, accounting for one each. The forms are genuinely wide-ranging: a dispersed citizen movement planting crops in roadside gaps, a therapeutic garden for mental health, a movable garden built from builders' skips, a nationwide school-gardening campaign, a retailer's rooftop community garden, and a municipal programme for the interim use of stalled land. Few in number, the line-up nonetheless reflects, across the board, the layered history that this country's urban farming carries.

More memorable than the numbers is the 'position in time' at which each case stands. Sydenham Garden began in 2002, the RHS Campaign for School Gardening in 2007, Incredible Edible and the Skip Garden in 2008–2009, Glasgow's Stalled Spaces in 2011, and IKEA Greenwich in 2019. These are not scattered by chance. The rise of social prescribing as a health policy, community self-help after the global financial crisis, the vacant lots produced under austerity — each starting year reflects the map of society's concerns and resource allocation at that moment. To line up the timeline of the cases is, in itself, to produce a miniature of contemporary British history.