The Olympic Allotment

For more than a century, the Manor Garden allotments have been a fertile source of fruit and veg for many local families. And then London won the 2012 Olympics

The Observer, April 2007

At their heart, allotments are about stories. Every owner has a story, and every planting has one, and if you gather them all together in one place – the waiting-list sagas, the slug invasions, the strange-looking carrots, the shared cups of tea and barbecues at sunset – you have something called a community.
Eighteen months ago, The Observer ran a story about the bountiful late-summer produce of an allotment in Hackney Wick tended by Samuel and Samantha Clark. The Clarks, the couple behind Moro restaurant and its cookbooks, were organising a Sunday lunch for 20 friends, and as they sat down to figs and chard and chilli and potato, a spectre hung over them like a finger of frost. An Olympic walkway was planned straight through their fertile soil.

At the time, the threat seemed reasonably distant; campaigns were planned, and there was fair optimism that the organisers would reconsider. The 80 plots had been there for more than 100 years. Painted huts and greenhouses had been erected next to wartime shelters, and the wartime shelters had been converted into stores for manure and watering cans, and all had a casual and weathered elegance about them that the style magazines would call ‘distressed’ and the rest of us would call ‘real’. Those who visit, even the sportiest, pro-Olympic ones, find it difficult to comprehend how a few weeks of athletic prowess could be allowed to spoil something so treasured.

Visitors have other questions, too. The Olympic committees talk of regeneration, but what could be more regenerative than a conscientiously managed plot? How does the ambition to be ‘the greenest Olympics ever’ sit well with plans to uproot ancient soil for the laying of concrete? The Manor Garden Allotments combine to form the most photogenic pile of rusting iron, wire mesh, stone paving, muddy paths, wild grasses, strong daffodils, potatoes, avocados, artichokes, kohl rabi, peas, leeks, cauliflower and lollo rosso. No one has yet managed a recognisable mango, but multi-ethnicity ensures specialities from the Caribbean, Africa, the Med and the Middle East. These allotments are, of course, as much a true picture of our country as any shiny steel rail put up for the visiting world. Everyone’s equal here; there are no medals for speed; no one uses the words ‘focus’ or ‘being in the zone’.

to read on download the Adobe PDF