Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 60

These aspects of Crouch and Ward's work demonstrate the influence of Hoggart
(1957) and Williams (1958, 1989): there is a concern with re-writing and valuing a
collective working-class history; ordinariness and the everyday form part of what is
worthy about culture; and the writers foreground, perhaps somewhat nostalgically,
the positive bonds and connections of working-class community (Bourke, 1994).
Yet while allotments have served to provide an alternative space for self-
sustainability for ordinary working people, allotment sites have conversely served
institutions and individuals concerned with the regulation of a potentially unruly
working-class. In these ways, their organisation forms part of the history of working-
class regulation charted in chapter one of this topic. The authors describe the actions
of educated philanthropic men, such as the clergyman John Stevens Henslow,
professor of botany at Cambridge and friend to Charles Darwin, who set up an
allotment scheme in Suffolk in the 1840s. His campaign for allotments, published in
the local newspaper and addressed to landlords, 'on the advantages to be expected
from the general establishment of a spade tenantry among the labouring classes,'
(Crouch and Ward 1999, 51) was surely an inducement that landlords recognise the
potential for social control that land plots would provide. Similarly, the topic details
examples of the rules and regulations by which allotment holders were forced to
abide: 'tenants shall maintain a character for morality and sobriety, and shall not
frequent a public-house on the Sabbathday' (Crouch and Ward 1999, 56) stated one
set enforced in 1872 for allotment gardens near Swindon. Yet the authors underplay
these kinds of philanthropic or paternalistic moves as effective mechanisms for
regulating the working-class. In their concern to celebrate the radicalism of the
allotment movement, Crouch and Ward tend to minimise the surveillance techniques
inherent in allotment schemes which were set up by those concerned about the
poor.
An important part of the movement, according to Crouch and Ward, is the
aesthetic challenge allotments provide to conventional images of the landscape, 'the
allotment breaks the rules: it fails to comply with the accepted image' (1999, 15).
Predominantly urban spaces, allotment gardens challenge both dominant mainstream
images of the rural landscape and they provide an alternative to 'supervised and
controlled' municipal parks, the 'open-air leisure pursuits' of the working-class terrace
garden or the 'politeness and privacy' of the Georgian square garden. Allotments, the
authors assert 'provide a landscape of freedom' (1999, 31). An important aspect of
the freedom of the landscape is expressed by the allotment shed: the authors describe
where sheds are located, how they have been maligned by councils and middle-class
onlookers and how they function for their owners. However, when the discussion
moves to the question of how sheds look, how their aesthetics are organised, the
authors fight shy of honest description. They fall to euphemistic statements which
circumvent any real analysis of the aesthetic meaning of their construction or 'look':
rather, ranking as an especially creative entity, shed construction is elevated to a
'self-builder's art' (1999, 11), sheds are unique 'expressions of individuality', indeed
they act as tangible cornerstones of resistance to dominant established landscape
images.
As leftist critics, Crouch and Ward are interested in weighing up the potential the
allotment movement provides for alternative meanings in the context of a collective