Dunno about 'helping' the labouring poor. The situation was that vast numbers of people had been forced off the land, and had become landless agricultural labourers, or factory workers. It was cheaper to lease a plot of land cheap to a farm labourer than to pay him a living wage. Most of our allotment tradition evolved from that beginning, but there are still a very few sites descended from the urban gardens of old. Once towns began to grow in the 18th Century, people became cut off from the land, while at the same time more and more farmland was passing into private ownership. People just outside towns found they could make more money leasing small plots to the urban non-poor (a guinea a year was a great deal of money in 1730) than they could by farming it. But that was all a long time ago, and purely of historical interest. Our current situation is very different.
