Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 23

of labour discipline and of social order' (Yeo and Yeo 1981, 172). Leisure historians
illustrate that the middle-class took a very negative view of public, community based
popular recreation during this period. Many of their objections were focused on the
fact that activities such as 'low-grade theatre, music hall or riotous street outing;
wakes, fairs and violent sporting activities; and the ubiquitous public house and
associated games and gambling' (Constantine 1981, 390) distracted the working-
class from family, home and the domestic. Later in the century football attracted men
towards organised commercial recreation - but again this was not home-centred.
As a result, growing middle-class dismay and alarm led to a series of campaigns
to discipline the working-class in their leisure consumption. Indeed, it was these
circumstances which led to attempts to encourage gardening as a civilising agent for
the urban and rural working-class. As the following extract from an editorial in an
edition of Amateur Gardening illustrates:
All that concerns us here to do is to direct the attention of our readers, and especially the
philanthropists among them, to the possibility of accomplishing much good among the
poor classes by directing their attention to the beauty of flowers … that will not tempt
them to drink, or gamble, or fight, or slander …One of the safest means of improving
the labouring population is to provide them with innocent recreations (Constantine 1981,
391).
Indeed some of these 'philanthropic' wishes to encourage popular gardening were
realised. For example, the Society for Promoting Window Gardening Amongst the
Working-Classes of Westminster organised flower shows in the 1860s and 1870s;
and several of the industrialists who built factory colonies, such as Lever at Port
Sunlight, built gardens for their workers and encouraged gardening as a recreation
by setting up yearly prizes for the best plots (Constantine 1981). In these ways,
gardening offered what the middle-class perceived as a deficient working-class some
kind of ameliorative potential: 'private gardens were expected to lead to healthier,
more contented, more efficient, and more respectable employees and citizens'
(Constantine 1981, 392). Unfortunately however, statistics show that while there
were more gardens available to working-class people in rural areas, there was a dearth
of private gardens in urban areas. The Rowntree survey of York conducted in 1901,
for example, showed that only 12 per cent of working-class families occupied class
1 houses, and of those only a handful had, 'a sad apology for a garden' (Constantine
1981, 393). Land proved costly, the working-class wage was low, high density of
building was unavoidable in towns and the population, as a result of industrialisation,
was drawn to urban centres: there were simply too many urban detractions to make
gardening a practical possibility in the nineteenth century.
By stark contrast, social change in the twentieth century meant that gardening
flourished as a working-class leisure activity. Several factors made home-centred
leisure more practically possible for ordinary people: the manual worker's nine hour
day was reduced to eight in 1919 and was further reduced by 1940 and the introduction
of British Summer Time in 1916 gave the gardener extra time in the evenings; urban
poverty decreased - wage increases were 30 per cent higher in 1938 than they had
been in 1913; and family size fell, which meant that people had more income to
spend on gardening (Constantine 1981). But the singularly most important factor