Where the British allotment began
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The British allotment began as compensation for land taken away. For centuries, ordinary people grew food on shared ground. Then landowners fenced it off, and the small plots handed back to the poor became the first allotments.
The roots run back to Anglo-Saxon England. Villages and manors held huge open fields, some of them hundreds of acres, and split them into thin strips that families worked for crops. That arrangement was known as the open-field system. The Guardian traces the habit of holding land in common to the same period, when people shared ground for growing food, grazing animals and gathering firewood.
After the Norman Conquest, more of that land passed to the lords, the monasteries and the church. The Reformation of the 1540s took much church land, but the crown passed it on to the lords rather than back to the villages.
Enclosure, and the first plots
The change that made the allotment came under Elizabeth I. In the late 1500s, landowners began to enclose the common land the poor had used for crops and livestock. In return, small plots of land were attached to tenants’ cottages, and that is the first mention of allotments. The National Science and Media Museum notes that these plots did little for the very poorest, some of whom starved once the commons closed.
Enclosure went on for about four centuries, through a long run of Acts of Parliament, as aristocrats fenced public land for their own use. Meanwhile people drifted from the fields to the towns. With no welfare state behind them, a family without land to grow on could go hungry.
Birmingham had urban plots early. By the second half of the 18th century it had “guinea gardens” on its outskirts, which vanished as the city spread and builders took the land.
In the north, the story ran a little differently. The Alnwick Civic Society records that enclosure and a rising population had made the countryside poorer from the middle of the 18th century. Schemes to give the poor land made little headway until the 1830s. Then three pressures arrived together: fear of unrest as soldiers came home from the Napoleonic wars, failed harvests in 1829 and 1830, and deepening poverty. Support for allotments grew, especially in the South and the Midlands, and by 1850 England had one plot for every 320 people.
Alnwick shows what a generous landowner could do. In 1848 the Duke laid out more than 200 plots there, enough for one in every six households in the town.
The Act of 1845
The General Enclosure Act of 1845 is where the modern allotment starts. Earlier Acts of 1836 and 1840 had let landowners enclose land without going to Parliament, provided most of them agreed. The 1845 Act tried to protect small holders and the public, partly out of fear of unrest. It told the enclosure commissioners to provide “field gardens” for the landless poor, each no bigger than a quarter of an acre.
On paper it was a turning point. In practice, very little enclosed land went to the poor. Of 615,000 acres enclosed under the Act, only about 2,200 acres became allotments.
When councils took over
Late in the century, Parliament stopped relying on landowners. The Allotments and Cottage Gardens Compensation for Crops Act 1887 required local authorities to provide allotments where people wanted them. Councils dragged their feet, so the law needed strengthening.
The Small Holdings and Allotments Act of 1908 settled the system. It placed the duty to provide allotments, where there was demand, on councils. The Alnwick Civic Society calls it the framework for the modern system. The National Allotment Society’s forerunner, the Agricultural Organisation Society, founded in April 1901, played a prominent part in getting it passed.
The Guardian dates the modern allotment to the early Victorian era. It also notes that the idea reaches back to the Anglo-Saxons and medieval enclosure. The word itself carries the history. It names the small patches of land attached to tenant farmers’ cottages.
What a plot asked of a family
A Victorian allotment was hard labour before it grew a single potato. The historian Lesley Acton describes landlords choosing a site, then facing the cost of clearing it. Ground often came strewn with debris. It had to be dug over, drained with ditches, laid with paths and fenced.
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Some landlords dodged that cost by handing the work to tenants. Many labourers turned the offer down. Others took it on in good faith and gave up after a short while. One account Acton quotes describes land so high, cold and steep that no plough could work it. The tenants there carried manure up four miles of steep hills.
Spade husbandry
Plots were dug almost entirely by hand, which is why the practice was called “spade husbandry”. The soil needed constant feeding, so allotment holders tended to keep pigs. The pigs ate vegetable waste, barley and potatoes, and gave manure back. Children gathered dung from the roads, left by horses and cattle droves. Some growers filled plaster-lined tanks with liquid manure from the cow-house, the pigsty and the privy.
Advice was plentiful and often wrong. One adviser warned that stable dung made vegetables “rank”. William Cobbett was more practical. He told growers to hoe deep in March, dig close to the plants, and let no weed “live a week”.
Whole families at work
By the second half of the 19th century, the plot was a family affair. Men did the heavy digging and spread the manure. In summer, women and children weeded, watered and picked. Large families did better, and so did tenants on old sites, where years of hard work had built up the soil.
Potatoes and green vegetables were the staples. Growers also raised wheat, carrots, turnips, mangel-wurzel, barley, peas, oats, rye and cabbages. The potato was a key crop. It needed no milling, it kept through winter, and it fed labourers who rarely had enough to eat.
The record from Alnwick is unusually exact. When The Cottage Gardener visited in 1852, it found three main sites in the town. Holders there grew mangold, swedes, potatoes, curled kale, carrots, onions, drumhead cabbage and rhubarb.
The Victorians also had a moral purpose in mind. As the poor moved to the towns, the Victorians saw a plot as a healthy alternative to drink. Back-to-back terraces often had no gardens at all, which pushed demand for town allotments higher still.
Rent suppers and prize marrows
A social life grew up around the plots. Some landlords held an annual rent supper, with roast beef and plum pudding, and used it to collect the rent. A tenant who paid late was not allowed to come. Prizes went to the best produce and the best-kept plots. Acton traces today’s horticultural shows back to those suppers.
Shows still matter. The Daily Herald photographed judges weighing up celery at the London Allotments and Gardens Show in 1934. North Yorkshire’s Egton Bridge Gooseberry Show was first held around 1800.
How a plot works today
The standard plot is still measured in an old unit. It is ten rods, or about 250 square metres. Some holders keep bees, rabbits or hens as well as growing crops. Councils own most sites, though some belong to self-managed associations or to the Church of England.
Rents stay low. Gardens Illustrated puts the average council fee at about £45 a year. Councils have also started to change the plots themselves. According to a 2025 report from the Association for Public Service Excellence, more than three quarters of councils have made plots smaller. Over half now allow only one plot per person or household.
A Social Farms & Gardens toolkit includes Welsh Government guidance for running a site. Its guides cover waiting lists, vandalism, toilets and safety. Another guide covers “devolved management”, in which plot holders run the site themselves.
The people who dug, and the people who fought for them
Railways shaped where plots sit. In the First World War, railway companies owned parcels of land too small to farm. They often let them to their own workers, which is why so many plots still run beside railway lines.
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A society for plot holders
Plot holders organised early. The National Allotment Society traces its roots to the Agricultural Organisation Society, founded in April 1901 to organise co-operatives, smallholdings and allotments. In 1920 the movement had 1,330,000 members. By 1930 that had fallen to 965,000.
On 10 March 1930, the National Union of Allotment Holders and the Allotment Organisation Society merged. Their president was Sir Francis Dyke Acland. The new society’s first task was to help the unemployed and those in part-time work. In the winter of 1930 it helped 64,000 families.
Acland gave a Fifty-Guinea Silver Challenge Cup for the area that most improved its allotments in a year. The society says that trophy is still awarded. After the war it pressed for new law. It published an Allotment Holders Charter in 1947, and three years of campaigning produced the Allotments Act 1950.
The society has changed its name several times. Its formal title is still the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners, and it trades as the National Allotment Society. King Charles III is its patron. In 1997 it completed a national survey of allotments, the first full data in over 20 years.
Who holds a plot now
For decades the typical holder was older. A House of Commons committee report noted that the over-50s “traditionally” dominated allotment holding. Plot holders often keep their plots for decades, which slows the queue.
That picture has shifted. The National Allotment Society blames rising demand on the cost of living, on the growing-your-own habit people picked up during Covid, and on wider interest in healthy eating. A 2025 National Allotments Week survey found that 80% of holders said their allotment had helped them make social connections. Almost half of respondents said their site had no designated social space.
Allotments also give people a role beyond their own plot. Many holders sit on their association’s committee and help run the site. The National Allotment Society describes allotments as places to learn, share knowledge and meet neighbours.
JC Niala
One name recurs in the recent coverage. JC Niala is a writer, allotments historian and artist with a PhD in urban gardening. She spent 36 months on fieldwork and met people who had started new sites by using the 1908 Act. She thinks a key reason the Act is underused is that too few people know about it.
“Access to growing land should not be contingent on money,” she told Gardens Illustrated. She says one strength of allotments is that they bring together people from all walks of life.
In 2023 Niala led a project with the artists Julia Utreras and Sam Skinner, backed by Greenpeace. They used freedom of information requests to count the people waiting for a plot. The answer was 174,183 applications across Britain.
How two wars put the allotment on a poster
War made the allotment a national cause. In the First World War, a German blockade caused food shortages and sent demand for plots soaring. By the end of that war Britain had 1.5 million allotments. Once the fighting stopped, much of that land went back to recreation or housing.
By the late 1930s the number of allotments had halved. The Royal Horticultural Society notes that Britain still relied heavily on food from overseas. Memories of the last war were fresh. Between 1914 and 1917, German U-boats had sunk an estimated six million tons of imported food.
The call to spades
The government’s answer, the RHS says, was the Dig for Victory campaign, a national “call to spades” launched in 1940. Many of the people who answered had never grown a vegetable.
The campaign spoke in pictures. Abram Games designed two of its posters, “Use Spades not Ships” and “Grow your own Food”. Irene Mitchell designed “Dig for Victory now”. The Imperial War Museum holds all three.
The RHS added a book. The Vegetable Garden Displayed came out in 1941, with more than 300 photographs taken at RHS Garden Wisley. It showed step by step how to dig drills, sow seed and thin seedlings.
Two ministers wrote forewords. Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, wrote “This is a Food War” and that every extra row of vegetables in allotments saved shipping. The RHS printed the book in black and white, in soft covers, and sold it for one shilling. The first 25,000 copies sold out fast. Reprints of 25,000 and then 50,000 followed by Christmas 1941. It is still the society’s most successful publication.
The book went on tour, too. Its photographic lantern slides were used in gardening lectures across the country, then turned into exhibition boards for town halls and schools. One set turned up about 60 years later in a scout hut on the Isle of Wight.
Every flat patch of ground
The public answered in numbers. By 1943, the RHS says, Britain had 3.5 million allotments producing over a million tonnes of vegetables. Gardens, parks and golf courses were dug for food. So was the moat of the Tower of London. The RHS holds a photograph of Isabel Beech digging in front of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, around 1940.
Other counts are lower. The National Science and Media Museum puts the wartime harvest at 1.3 million tonnes from nearly 1.5 million plots. The Alnwick Civic Society cites an estimate of 1.75 million plots across England and Wales by 1944. The sources do not agree on the wartime peak, so treat any single figure with care.
The National Allotment Society handed out seed sent from America: 150,000 collections, over 100 tonnes, shared among 1.5 million gardeners.
On television
After the war, the screen kept the idea alive. In the 1970s, interest in self-sufficiency surged, and the BBC’s The Good Life, which ran from 1975 to 1978, captured the mood. The Alnwick Civic Society notes that decline slowed during that decade, then picked up again.
A House of Commons committee urged gardening magazines and programmes to give allotments more space.
Where the allotment stands now
The plots shrank for half a century after the war, and now the queue for them is the longest it has been in years. Rationing kept demand high for a while, and food rationing did not fully end until 1954. In 1949 an advisory body recommended four acres of allotments for every 1,000 people, which led to the Allotments Act 1950.
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Then the decline set in. From a peak of about 1.4 million plots in 1943, numbers fell to around 500,000 in the 1970s. By 1996 about 297,000 remained. Rising land prices gave councils short of money a reason to sell plots to housebuilders.
The Thorpe Report
The government noticed. Professor Harry Thorpe’s report on allotments went to Parliament in 1969, and the National Allotment Society says it was never debated. In the Commons in July 1971, the minister Graham Page welcomed its idea of giving allotments “a new look” as leisure gardens. He also said councils, not ministers, should decide how much allotment land to provide. He planned to remove the ministerial controls on allotment authorities, which dated back nearly 50 years.
Plot holders fought to keep those controls. In 1980, the society says, its lobbying helped keep the rule that a council needs the Secretary of State’s permission to dispose of allotments. That rule sits in section 8 of the Allotments Act 1925 and covers “statutory” sites, the land councils bought or set aside for allotments.
A House of Commons committee looked again in the late 1990s. It found that only two of 51 statutory sites lost since 7 May 1997 had been replaced. It called that rate “alarming and unacceptable”. It also rejected a minister’s view that allotments were a local matter: the committee called them a national issue.
The queue
Demand came back. The National Science and Media Museum describes an “allotment renaissance” since the 1990s, driven by worry about global heating and interest in organic food. Supply did not keep pace.
In 2023, the Greenpeace-backed count found at least 157,820 applications on English council waiting lists. That was 81% more than 12 years earlier. Across Britain the total was 174,183. The average wait was three years. In Islington, north London, it was 15. Bristol had the longest list, with 7,630 applications.
The National Allotment Society said usable plots often stand vacant for periods because of evictions, overgrown plots or poor access. The society says interest has reached 57 people waiting for every 100 plots.
There may be some relief. The Association for Public Service Excellence’s 2025 report found that 63% of councils still had average waits of more than 18 months. It also found that the share of councils with more than 1,000 people waiting had held steady, a sign that demand may be levelling off. Four in five councils now set aside wildlife areas on their sites. Six in ten offer cheaper rent to groups such as pensioners and people on low incomes.
Private plots and old rights
Private firms have moved in where councils cannot keep up. Roots Allotments opened a 700-plot site outside Bristol, from £9.99 a month for a 12 square metre patch. Critics call such sites gardening for the elite.
Some old sites remain at risk. The Duke of Northumberland lost a bid in October 2021 to build 80 flats on part of Syon Park, which would have removed plots in use since 1917. In Bath, the council is working to buy the Combe Down Allotments after the landowner gave notice to end the lease.
The oldest tool is still the law. If six people from different households apply together, Gardens Illustrated explains, their council must find them space under the allotments legislation. Gardens Illustrated traces that duty to the Small Holdings and Allotments Act of 1907 and 1908. Our explainer on the law behind Britain’s allotments follows how that cover has held.
Today Britain has an estimated 330,000 plots. At the wartime peak there were over a million. The RHS still keeps a digitised first edition of The Vegetable Garden Displayed online, for anyone starting out.
Starter guide
These are the books, posters, laws and places to read and see, each named by a trusted source in its account of the allotment.
- Allotments Act 1887 (1887). The Act as Parliament passed it, which legislation.gov.uk offers as the original King’s Printer PDF.
- The Vegetable Garden Displayed (Royal Horticultural Society, 1941). The RHS’s Dig for Victory manual, with over 300 photographs, and still the society’s most successful publication.
- Use Spades not Ships (Abram Games). A wartime poster in the Imperial War Museum, which the RHS sets beside its own campaign work.
- Grow your own Food (Abram Games). A second Games poster from the same campaign, also held by the Imperial War Museum.
- Dig for Victory now (Irene Mitchell). Mitchell’s poster for the campaign, another Imperial War Museum holding.
- We the 174,183 demand allotments (JC Niala, Julia Utreras and Sam Skinner, 2023). A 30 metre work of living art, set with seeds and Amazon ash, shown at a government department to make the waiting list visible.
- Community Empowerment Act (Scottish Government, 2015). The Guardian names it as the Scottish law that urges councils to provide more communal growing space.
- RHS Garden Wisley. The garden where the photographs for The Vegetable Garden Displayed were taken.
- The Tower of London moat. One of the unlikely places turned over to vegetables during Dig for Victory.
