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One cold grey February morning, back in 2001, we turned the key and opened the creaking gate on to a world that could not have been further from the built-up street just strides away. As far as the eye could see, scattered sheds teetered on the edge of a tidal wave of dense bramble. Halfway down the hill, just as the path disappeared into this surge, were plots 20 to 24: our new allotments. Whatever else, this was going to be groundbreaking stuff.

Driven by the vision that more food can and should be grown in London, we set up OrganicLea on a derelict allotment in Chingford, east London. The Lea Valley, which for centuries used the river to transport food down the Thames, from Saxon settlers growing celery in the sixth century to Italians growing cucumbers in glasshouses in the 1950s, was a good place to start.

Over the next year or two we cleared the brambles, made a compost heap, built raised beds, and planted a forest garden with apple trees, worcesterberries and blackcurrant bushes. We created a number of features, including a pond, a willow dome and a compost toilet, built into a honeysuckle bush. All our vegetable planting was done using organic and permaculture principles, working with nature, not against it, to grow food in a sustainable way. We then started to run rudimentary gardening courses from the potting shed, and sell our seasonal produce.

For the past nine years we have managed the 12-acre site as a community market garden. We grow more than eight tonnes of fruit and veg a year, feeding 330 households through our veg box scheme, as well as sending produce to market stalls and eateries across London. We work with the local council to deliver accredited horticulture courses and helped it develop a food policy, which aims to ensure that locally grown, healthy and sustainable food is affordable and accessible to all.

We also run a volunteering programme that welcomes participants from all walks of life to take part, from seed sowing to veg box packing. And we support young people and residents groups to develop their own food growing spaces all over east London.

We do all this as a workers co-operative, employing 15 members. Where normal allotments are rented by individuals, were a community food project, and as a workers co-operative we manage the operation ourselves, without any need for bosses or shareholders.

The community food movement is flowering in the UK and we are proud founder members of Londons community food growers network and the land workers alliance, organisations that are drawing people back to the land and using the land as a way to contribute to local politics.

Allotment gardens have always been more than mere domestic food growing units. From their very beginning in the Victorian period, when land was given to the labouring poor for growing food, theyve provided a space for recreation and an alternative to industrial capitalism.

Allotments offer a way for individuals and the community to come together. They are special places. In 1908, the Small Holdings and Allotments Act placed a duty on local authorities to provide allotments according to demand, and by the end of the first world war land was made available to everyone, primarily as a way of assisting returning service men. By 1925, local authorities were banned from selling or converting allotments without ministerial consent.

This means that, legally speaking, selling from allotment gardens is a murky issue. It is legally permissible for allotment gardens to market the surplus, up to 49% of what allotmenteers produce, and councils are also entitled to put unwanted allotments to commercial use on a year-by-year basis. We believe there is a strong case for promoting limited trading activity: it would enable people to spend more time on their plots, because they can generate some income from it, and would stimulate the local food economy.

By 2009, seven years after signing our first allotment contract, we had built such a reputation that when the council closed down its central plant nursery operation, it entrusted us with the facility. Our site is now located where they originally managed all the local parks and street tree operations.

We are one of many responses to a broken food system, that exploits producers and harms consumers. It contributes significantly to climate change, air and water pollution and is essentially run for the short term profits of food corporations rather than the long term benefit of communities and the environment.

Our purpose is to demonstrate what can happen if groups of committed people with ideas are given space to nurture and grow.

Ru Litherland works at OrganicLea

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Read the rest here:
Carrots and communism: the allotments plotting a food revolution - The Guardian