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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.