The Gardens of the British Working Class

While, as the author notes, working class was not used until 1790, the book begins in the sixteenth century. And while there are no direct references to utopias or utopianism, there are a number of themes and topics discussed in the book that are related to utopianism and the way gardens and gardening have appeared in utopias. And gardens and gardening have been important in utopias from the very beginning.1 Gardens, for example, are central to life in More's Utopia and were the only area of life in which competition was not merely allowed but encouraged, albeit among areas not individuals. Margaret Willes mentions More only in connection with his critique of the enclosure movement (missed by the indexer), being only concerned with real gardens, but she notes a book on gardening published within More's lifetime. So the book follows aspects of gardens and gardening that could to some extent be mapped onto the history of gardens and gardening in utopian literature.At the most general level, the author refers to the fact that the better-off felt that gardens would be good for the working class. Gardens would keep the workers out of the pubs and provide them with better food than they could afford on the wages the better-off paid them.A topic that runs throughout the book and has been connected to utopianism involves the various stages of what came to be called the allotment movement, which is much older than I thought and is connected with the eighteenth-century enclosures that took away land that had been used by families for generations. Out of a combination of guilt from evicting those who had cultivated the land and fear of a violent response, some of those who had profited from the enclosures and some of their critics advocated that allotments, primarily for agricultural workers, be set aside. Such allotments were often vehemently opposed by farmers, who contended that the workers would put their best efforts into their allotments rather than into their poorly paid employment, which seems only reasonable to me.In the first half of the nineteenth century a top-down movement emerged with the same motivations as expressed regarding the value of gardens for workers. But the allotment movement actually created Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) for individuals and frequently created communities among the allotment holders, although it is always worth remembering that the holders were not owners.Allotments waxed and waned over the years, with tremendous growth during World Wars I and II and significant reductions after each war. Railroads had provided allotments for their workers on land alongside of some tracks, still to be seen in some places, but the elimination of rail lines following the Beeching report in the early 1960s, as the land was sold in twentieth-century enclosures, also eliminated the allotments. And as land in and around cities became more valuable, the land on which allotments had stood for decades was privatized, and the allotments were eliminated. This led to an increasing demand for allotments; Willes mentions one man being told that there was a seven-year waiting list that never got shorter.The demand for allotments led to what is called guerilla gardening or avant gardening, in which abandoned or simply currently unused space is taken over and a garden is established.2 Often this was a community garden in which the people from the surrounding area, having cleaned up the space, which had most often been used as a local dump, created a garden in which they grew vegetables for local consumption and flowers if space permitted. Some present it as a form of squatting, which has also been treated as having utopian dimensions.The growing of flowers reflects another topic that Willes stresses. While many of the books on gardening depicted workers' cottage gardens with flourishing flower beds, the reality was that most such gardens produced food not flowers. But she notes that while flowers were a luxury workers could rarely afford to grow, wherever space could be made available, even very small spaces such as window boxes, flowers were grown. And she cites examples of the use of such small spaces for flowers throughout the entire history.Another topic that relates to utopianism is the emergence of company towns, a number of which, unlike the standard image of the company town, actually treated their workers decently and in some cases provided substantial gardens. Some such towns, most notably Robert Owen's New Lanark (not mentioned) and Titus Salt's Saltaire (discussed), are regularly discussed as utopian, but the book includes a number of such towns that are not a regular part of the history of utopian experiments, including some eighteenth-century towns. Also mentioned are Chartist colonies that, although leading Chartists had initially opposed such communities, were established, with some being quite successful, all, of course, having gardens. Communities that are standards within the history of British intentional communities, such as Whiteway and Clousden Hill, are also mentioned, and substantial space is given to communities such as Port Sunlight and Bournville, which were company towns in the Saltaire tradition. And, of course, the Garden City movement, including the garden suburbs, is discussed.New Lanark should have been discussed because it included allotments, which were referred to in Owen's 1800 Rules and Regulations for the Inhabitants; gardens were provided for each householder; and there are still allotments in New Lanark today.3 Given the general depth of the research in the book, it is surprising that such a well-known community as New Lanark was missed. But the book includes a vast amount of information and is heavily illustrated, including some quite beautiful color plates

Aesthetics · Allotment · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Utopia · Working class · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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