Read our Association History to learn how we were established as a self-managing allotment association. What follows here are some snippets of history going back to the establishment of the site.

There has been a large allotment site on Stoke Lane, Gedling since 1920. During the Great War, temporary allotments were made available to working men but after the Armistice those fields were returned to their original owners, the plotholders being given notice to quit. Early in the twentieth century, the growing population of Gedling and Netherfield (including returned servicemen as well as colliers and railwaymen) meant that Carlton Urban District Council was under pressure to provide a large permanent site. Finally, in 1920, the eleven acre Stoke Lane site was established.

Council minutes identify the land they took over by Ordnance Survey field numbers and refer to it as Glebe land. Locals, however, knew the site as ”The Bomb Field”. Early in 1920, the site was divided up into traditionally sized plots which were allocated by the drawing of lots. The story on our site is that one of the would-be tenants was a councillor and that he swapped the lot he drew for one he liked better. The first plot had a crater in the middle of it.

The Bomb Field (as our site is still sometimes called) probably received a direct hit during the raid on the City of Nottingham carried out by Zeppelin L17 in September 1916. During this raid, three people lost their lives and eight others were injured. In Netherfield, six properties on Dunstan Street and Cross Street, where the playing field is now, were completely destroyed. Some of the zeppelin's payload dropped harmlessly into fields near the Colwick sidings which may explain the rejected plot's unusual feature.

Old tenants report that, before becoming allotments, the site was used by Great Northern Railways as a midden. Whilst, one hundred years later, discarded clay pipes are no longer to be found, shards of pottery and glass still turn up, exposed by winter weather and digging. If the site was indeed used for what the Victorians referred to as “Nuisance Removal” then, thankfully, that was in an age before plastics and disposable nappies.

There were other factors that made the site less than delightful. In his autobiography, “My Life With Roses”, Harry Wheatcroft writes about the business he and his brother established on an acre of land right next to the allotments:

“Today there are small houses and bungalows on what was our first nursery garden, and I think that the owners who succeed in producing good crops there are to be congratulated – even when I remember the work that we must have put into the land in the early nineteen-twenties. The nursery was not only right down at Trent Valley level, about a mile from the river itself, and on gravelly ground, in addition it was on the wrong side of the city, out on the north-east, so that the prevailing south-west wind helped to carry out on to it a good deal of the city's dirt and dust. To make matters even worse, there was the big railway engine works at Netherfield only a short distance away, not a happy kind of works to have nearby when you're trying to grow roses because the smuts, dust, grime and soot are perpetually blowing across and settling on your blooms as soon as they begin to come out.”

Nowadays, thanks to the Clean Air Act, all that is carried by the south-west wind are the chimes of the Nottingham Council House bells.

Regardless of smuts on cabbages, the Allotment Movement was once an important way of relieving poverty as plotholders could supplement the diet of their families by keeping hens and rabbits and growing vegetables. For example one of our early tenants, a man called Sid Jelley, worked as a plumber and rented two plots. He grew vegetables on one of them (which he could access from his house on Emerys Road) and on the other (on the far side of the site!) he kept pigs.

Some tenants do not stay the course, losing interest after furious bouts of shed-building, but others garden the same plot over decades. Clive Howes reports that he is only the fourth tenant in his plot's one hundred year history. Tenant number three was Bernard Sharpe. Clive took over the plot when Bernard gave it up on condition that he continued to clip the plot's privet hedge. The hedge, which was set in 1953, is shaped like two locomotives in tribute to the railwaymen of Colwick. The plot's second tenant was Bernard's father and the first tenant was a railwayman who worked as a guard.

Successful tenants are of a stubborn breed, not easily deterred by disaster. In June 1936 Mr E. Sharpe of Netherfield (Bernard's relative?) wrote to the Nottingham Evening Post describing desperate stratagems employed by Stoke Lane gardeners to deal with a plague:

“This summer all the tenants are complaining that their cabbage plants, flowers and kidney beans are being eaten off by rabbits. The methods used to scare off these animals and protect the plants are many and varied. One sees a stake, clothed with trousers, a coat and an enamel wash-basin reminding one of a tin-hatted soldier, while another relies on an old oil drum on two sticks with paper clothed sticks for arms and an old saucepan for head-gear. Some gardeners have sprayed their plants with paraffin, others have encircled them with string soaked in creosote, still others with odds and ends of wire while other optimists rely on sheets of newspaper spread around the garden. Some of the men have ransacked their cupboards for old clothing for scarecrows, and it is stated that one poor fellow was caught by his wife exchanging spare underwear with a rag man for a child's windmill in the hope that the gyrations of this toy would prove effective. Up to now, the rabbits are winning and the plants are devoured almost as soon as set out.”

The site suffered a temporary invasion again in 2006 when work to extend the Colwick Loop Road drove the rabbits, who had been living harmlessly alongside us, onto our site.

Allotments during World War II stir memories of “Dig for Victory” posters. You would assume that there was no room for half-hearted gardening during the war and the hungry years of rationing that followed but letters to the Evening Post reveal that some plots were nonetheless left vacant. Anyone exempted from military service was typically working very long hours and often spent his 'leisure' hours volunteering with the Home Guard. Allotment gardening requires regular investment of time and this he would struggle to give. Vegetables might be planted but then be smothered by weeds or perish for want of watering.

On the subject of watering, the site only got standpipes in the 1980's. Early plotholders sank wells but these are now dry as Severn Trent began extracting water from the underground aquifers.

After the war, allotment gardening went out of favour and many plots were unlet, growing couch grass, bindweed and brambles and concealing discarded domestic appliances. The site may not have attracted new tenants but the wildlife was plentiful, featuring flocks of goldfinches raiding the teasels for their seeds and the song of the skylarks that nested in the neighbouring pasture land.

When the site became self-managed in 2000, it began to look tidier and a surge in the popularity of “growing your own” ensured that there was a waiting list for plots. Whilst those first plotholders of one hundred years ago would share our pleasure in tilling the soil and harvesting crops, there are aspects of modern-day allotmenteering that would astonish them. Here are a few of the changes the site has witnessed:

• few of us are motivated by sheer poverty

• we are not ashamed to use machinery on our plots or to drive there in our cars

• we have been known to buy sheds instead of building them from waste timber

• many of us are female.