The point about today’s and yesterday’s photos is that they are of a 500 sq. yard allotment I have recently taken-on on Clough Road allotment site. Last year I worked a small allotment on the same site and got the little plots winter dug ready for spring planting. However, this one became available and I was persuaded, rightly or not. So far I have been completely consumed with piling up the rubbish on this big site as it had not been possible for the elderly disabled previous tenant to work it for some years. The weather so far this year has further complicated matters. I’m sure if I went there this morning it would be standing water as it is over much of Pearson Park, Oak Road Playing Fields and elsewhere.
I shouldn’t make this point really but if one is hoping to get an allotment tenancy its an idea to visit your local site when the gates are open and enquire of the people on site. The Council have waiting lists for each site but so long as the annual bill is paid for each plot they don’t inform people on the list of neglected plots.
Clearly I need to do more research on the History of Allotments than has been given in this short run of blogs.
One point I would go back to is the provision of allotment plots before the Law required local authorities to provide those that we recognise today. 19th century O.S. maps show that in a number of East Riding parishes sites of rectangular plots were provided, almost certainly by the principal landowner, and often called ‘Canada Gardens’. Whether so named to dissuade emigration or because here, as in Canada, land was available to work, or for some other reason I cannot say. Hollar’s ‘bird’s eye’ map of Hull of the early 1640s shows some of the land that had been the gardens of Suffolk Palace as rectangular plots. Were these early urban allotments?