Protest saves town allotments - now there's a waiting list!
Bill Row, Chairman of the Bexley Federation of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners, is rightly proud of the impact his club has made over the past decade. “We had the council threatening to close down 23 of our 36 allotment sites about seven years ago. They were half empty and the council said they’d tried everything so that was it,” he said.
“We challenged them on it - there was a lot of public protest - and we managed to get all of them saved, with the help of a local councillor. We’ve now taken on the publicity of the allotments, from the council, and all the sites are full. We’ve actually got 200 on a waiting list at the moment.”
Publicising postive messages
Promoting the borough’s allotments forms a large part of the federation’s workload. “It’s all about getting positive messages into the papers,” explains Bill. “Rather than a shed’s been broken into, we want to see stories about how great it is to grow your own.”
Set up in the 1940s, in the country’s wartime drive towards self-sufficiency, the Federation has been encouraging the residents of Bexley to grow their own ever since. Run by six voluntary officers and 41 allotment representatives, BFALG attends shows and events to raise the profile of local food growing.
In 2009, BFALG volunteers took on the daunting task of clearing an underused allotment which had become overgrown with trees and a magnet for dumped rubbish. With support from a local business and neighbouring residents the site was fully cleared in four months. Retired taxi driver John Parsons is the new Cray’s Road Allotment Site Rep. He says, “It’s certainly brought everyone together and there’s a great mix of people - we’ve got four from Mauritius, an Australian, Chinese, African and Eastern European. For friendship and meeting people, it’s an ideal place”.