The Allotment Fight Continues To Inspire

Is it typical of modern England that what would have been, in my 60’s youth, young people fighting at the barricades, ends up as an installation outside the Albert Hall?

But that is what has happened to the lost fight to save a one hundred year old allotment site in East London so that it can provide a pathway to the four week Olympics in 2012.

As for the Olympics they were won on a lie. Figures on the back of an envelope undercutting the excellent and honest Paris bid. Soon the bills will be coming in for Londoners and chunk of the lottery fund set aside for good causes has been ransacked for years - it has just been admitted in Parliament. It is disgraceful, and will be seen to be even worse in the future.

As for now there is this allotment shed outside the Albert Hall in London until next Thursday. Ironically it is part of French art student  Thomas Pausz’s project on his MA course . Thomas came from Paris where he admits to having seen allotments on the outskirts of the City. If you have ever travelled around France you will have observed allotments from a large collection in Calais, to a fewer on the Normandy coast, to the impressive surrounding of Rheims motorway by allotmenteers.

Thomas tells me that although he lived on the edges of Paris he became aware of the allotments, even if he never visited them. Now he finds it wonderful that there is a very popular jazz album in France called Jardin Ouvrir, that has based its unframed music on the allotment experience. It is a modern jazz album, reflecting what the musicians felt after they visited allotments.

Thomas is a student at the Royal College of Art on the design studies course. He lives in Hackney, in London’s East End, and cycles everywhere. One day last summer he ended up on the Manor Garden allotments, not even knowing that they were condemned. He was fascinated by the community that he found there.  Unfortunately he did not find or enter the large green community shed, that became a centre of the lengthy fight.  I remember going there, and spending time in the shed, which was quite large, talking with elder allotmenteers and viewing even paintings that had been hung there.

Outside, the excellent leader of the fight Julie Sumner had pinned all the latest press cuttings. Most notable for the lack of support for the fight was London’s only evening newspaper the Evening Standard.  Their whimsical allotment writer now writes about them - but typically too late!

The trouble with allotment battles is that everyone who could do anything to stop their death usually arrives too late.  But at least Thomas Pausz has seen to it that there has been a real memorial, and plans to get even more involved with the allotment movement in the future.

“I really struggled with this project," he tells me, "because I wanted to re-build the community shed so everyone not involved could relate to it."

"I sent out a lot of questionnaires to members, and spoke to a lot of people as well, but when I finished it there were quite a lot of complaints saying that it was not as it really had been. I would agree, because I did not know the original. And, for example, instead of pieces of corrugated tin I have put corrugated plastic in its side so everyone can see inside it. I should have put the carpet on the floor too, but I did not know about that.”

He did try to get real detail by replacing the solid steel surrounded windows, even going to a special scrap yard in Suffolk to find them. But he could not find the original article. It does make you think that the whole edifice should have been taken to bits and rebuilt on the new site a mile away.

All this vandalism is down to the London Development Agency, who are now under investigation about other matters involving the desperate-for-power Mayor Ken Livingstone. I shall be writing soon about what he happened to the dis-placed plot holders.

Meanwhile go to the Royal College of Art and see their exhibition reflecting the whole ecological disaster.

Bookmark with:

• Delicious
• Digg
• reddit
• StumbleUpon

Don’t know what this is?

Read the 50connect Guide To Social Bookmarking.