"The Hungerhill Allotment Gardens "
April 2010 Meeting Report
Speaker - Mo Cooper
The April 2010 meeting of the Keyworth & District Local History Society took place in the Centenary Lounge, Keyworth, on Friday 9th April. The guest speaker for the evening was Mo Cooper and she gave a presentation on ‘The Hungerhill Allotment Gardens’
While most of Mo’s talk was about the Hungerhill Gardens she began by putting them into a wider context. The origin of allotment gardens is obscure but by the early 19th Century there were two distinct types; rural and urban. The former were for the poor and were associated with Enclosure. During the period 1760 to 1820 hundreds of parishes were enclosed by parliamentary acts, including Keyworth (1799). One feature of most acts was the privatisation of common land which had for centuries been used by the poor to supplement meagre incomes: for instance, with firewood, wild fruit and free grazing for one or two geese or other livestock. The loss of the commons was compensated for by setting aside allotments: areas for the poor to grow some of their own food – in Keyworth, 4 acres at the end of Selby Lane. The commissioners who made this provision were motivated by a combination of fear (of riot and rebellion), economy (keeping down wages and the Poor Rate) and compassion. But landowners were anxious that individual allotments should be small so that their holders would still need to make themselves available for farm work.
Urban allotments, like those at Hungerhill (St Ann’s) in Nottingham, were originally provided for affluent town folk as places of relaxation and recreation. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution once spacious towns became congested with labourers and their houses. There was no longer room for mansions with gardens. In addition, smoke and smells made gardens in town undesirable. So those who could afford to sought refuge for themselves and their families in out-of-town gardens which were nevertheless near enough to be reached by horse and carriage in the pre-railway age. In Nottingham, town congestion was made worse by the refusal of burgesses to allow development on town land, while land for gardens was already available at Hungerhill where burgesses had awarded themselves garden plots as early as the 17th century. This may be why the Hungerhill today contains both the oldest and the largest cluster of allotments in Britain.
Hungerhill therefore differed from most rural allotments in the following ways: individual plots were much larger (they averaged a tenth of an acre, twice the size of the Centenary Lounge); they were not primarily used for growing vegetables but contained lawns, flower beds, children’s play equipment and often quite substantial weekend cottages; they were shut off from each other by high hedges and lockable gates; and most of the gardening was done, not by the allotment holders themselves but by paid labour.
From the mid-19th Century allotment holders began to change: as towns expanded (in Nottingham’s case, following enclosure of town lands in 1845), the allotments were no longer out-of-town, while railways and improved roads enabled the affluent to escape into the country proper – the beginning of the commuter age. Meanwhile many industrial workers were keen to supplement low, irregular wages with garden produce – vegetables, flowers and particularly roses – much of it for sale. The staple 19th Century industry of Nottingham was textiles (framework knitting and lace), subject to wide fluctuations of activity: allotments provided a means of self help during periods of unemployment. However, the grid of hedges enclosing individual plots, and therefore their size, remained unchanged, allowing space for recreation as well as cultivation to continue, as it does to this day.
The 20th Century has seen periods of both decline and growth in allotment activity in town and country alike. The long-term decline has reflected growing prosperity and a less pressing need to supplement incomes; a greater range of recreation available to the many from foreign holidays to watching TV; cheap ready-made meals from supermarkets. Nationally, the number of allotments halved between 1890 and 1990. But both World Wars saw sharp reversals of this trend, with government sponsored Dig for Victory campaigns. During WW2, something like half of all fruit and vegetables consumed in Britain came from allotments.
More recently, the long-term decline has been sharply reversed during the last decade. In Hungerhill, Keyworth and elsewhere, unoccupied plots have again come under cultivation, with growing waiting lists of would-be allotment holders. In 2001 Hungerhill was registered with English Heritage and became a Grade 2* Listed site as the “St. Ann’s Heritage Gardens”, an area of 70 acres and 670 plots, with a wide range of occupants of many nationalities reflecting successive waves of immigration into Nottingham, and bringing with them seeds and know-how from, for instance, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East. A Lottery Fund grant is supporting the renewal of long-neglected plots and connecting avenues, as well as the development of projects to enhance wild life and to provide an environment in which the problems of vulnerable members of the community and of delinquent children are being successfully addressed.