Happy 200th Birthday!

[Rhubarb Thrasher]

Allotments are officially 200 years old (today?)

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2311913.ece

more pictures than the story in the Telegraph 

[teresa]

You have to admire, the Rev Stephen Demainbray, for looking after his flock.

[BAK]

If we associate what we call allotments with the campaign to provide land for the rural poor then the start actually occurs around 1770, probably near Tewkesbury.

However, there are individual examples of land provision which go back even earlier.

[Robert_Brenchley]

I wonder whether that's the oldest site in the country. My own site is claimed as 'one of the oldest', and it only goes back to 1840. Guinea gardens around Birmingham actually started around 1720, when the rent really was a guinea a year. My site was one of the last set up as tyhe first ones were swallowed up by development.

It would be interesting to know more about the history of that site.

[Rhubarb Thrasher]

i think it was the first time the word "allotment" was used in the sense we know it

[Robert_Brenchley]

Most likely it was, as the urban gardens have a different origin; at a guinea a year in 1720, they weren't aimed at the poor!

[BAK]

a little bit more ...

The campaign among the gentry to provide land to the rural poor was in part orchestrated by The Gentleman's Magazine in the 1760s.

Apart from the plots near Tewkesbury (from circa 1770), several members of the nobility provided plots later in this century. They included Lords Carrington, Winchilsea and Egremont.

In the late 1790s Thomas Estcourt provided circa 100 plots at Long Newnton in Wiltshire.

Burchardt, the historian, reckons that urban allotments started to appear around 1840.