Projects: ALLOTMENTS

Thousands of Lincoln residents have cultivated an allotment plot. In wartime, their contributions to feeding the city have been valued. In peacetime, allotment sites have thrived and declined with changing lifestyles. It is these people who have created the history of allotments in the city of Lincoln. In between their working days, in between family commitments, in between bad weather and at the edges of daylight, while health allowed, they gradually turned pasture and arable land into hand-dug soil of high yielding fertility. They have passed advice down through the generations and experimented bravely with new approaches. They have influenced and cajoled decision makers and maintained the struggle to keep allotment sites.

Geoff Tann’s booklet, Lincoln's Allotments: A History, published by the Survey of Lincoln (2008) with help from the National Lottery Awards for All scheme, explored the origins of Lincoln's allotment plots and provides a glimpse of social trends which prompted the development, and at times led to the closure, of the city's many different allotment sites, past and present.

As part of the research for the booklet, detailed information was collected about the 80 allotment sites known to have once existed in Lincoln. This detail was outside the scope of the booklet but has been presented as an Historical Gazetteer of Allotment Sites (below).

Copies of the booklet were issued to City of Lincoln Councillors in 2008 by The Survey of Lincoln. In 2011, the council asked to have the information in digital format for use in their preparation of an Allotments Strategy for the city.

We would like to thank Canadian based City Farmer for their inclusion of the booklet on their blog for 15th January 2012 - www.cityfarmer.info.org

You can contribute your own recollections of and information about Lincoln’s Allotments by offering your comments. The Survey of Lincoln will update the Gazetteer with further information as it comes to light.