Can You Dig It?

Turning over the earth on the allotment in yesterday afternoon’s intermittent sunshine, preparing the soil for potatoes, it occurred to me that there was a time when digging and planting on communal land such as this was a truly dissenting act – one that could lead to persecution and prosecution.

Over three hundred and fifty years ago, a group of radicals began planting vegetables and building homes on common land that had been seized and enclosed by local landowners at St. George’s Hill in Surrey. Food prices were high in the wake of the English Civil War, and the protestors called for others to join them in their project of communal farming and living. Alarmed by such militant action, the landowners called in the troops and the threat of trouble quickly drove some away; but many stuck it out. Throughout the spring and summer of 1649, the “Diggers” as they became known, were led by Gerrard Winstanley as they withstood a campaign of violence and intimidation. It was only after being taken to court that the Diggers were evicted from St. George’s Hill and, when they had left, they immediately established another community at nearby Little Heath. Convinced of their design for life, Winstanley and his followers sent out envoys to spread the word and Digger communities were founded in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire as a result.

Gerrard Winstanley, a herdsman and Protestant reformer, had come to prominence earlier in 1649 with the publication of a pamphlet in which he, and others, called for equality for the common people of England; he felt that the people had been deprived of their birthright since the Norman conquest. Unlike the Levellers, who had begun campaigning during the Civil War for equality in relation to law, Winstanley and his followers argued that freedom could only be obtained by restoring and strengthening the people’s relationship with the land. They called themselves The True Levellers but, because of the nature of their direct action, the term Diggers was quickly attached to them. And it was the putting into practice what they preached that made the Diggers so dangerous to the authorities. This led to their movement being quickly quashed but their example informed much subsequent anarchist and agrarian socialist thought, and led to some of their ideas being put into practice with startlingly contrasting results: think the Quakers and the Khmer Rouge.

Perhaps the real legacy is a little more prosaic. In his 1973 book Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward defined the allotment as land where ordinary people are the catalysts and designers of their own space and community. The true heirs, you might say, of the Digger spirit.

Holidays in the Sun

In his 1973 book, Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward argued that anarchist society “is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.” He felt that anarchism was not some “speculative vision of a future society” but “a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.” For Ward, one of the best examples of anarchy in action was the allotment site, where ordinary people were the catalysts and designers of their own space and community.

The site where I have an allotment is leased from a fruit farmer by the parish council, who in turn rent plots to individuals. But the organisation of the site is carried out by an association of allotment-holders: mowing the communal paths and areas; maintaining the seed exchange; organising seasonal celebrations and events; helping or clearing struggling plots. Put simply - anarchy in action.

The allotment is blooming this year: an abundance of strawberries; a huge harvest of early potatoes; brassicas bursting out of their netting; plump beetroot; our best garlic crop yet; and with lush sweet corn plants and rampant pumpkin and squash stems yet to produce, it will be the best year we have had. With the sunniest summer since 2006, when we had a bumper vegetable crop in our garden, it is not hard to work out why. But it is not sunshine alone that has produced this exceptional crop: last autumn I bought a tractor load of cow muck from a local farmer and top-dressed the whole plot with it.

But the allotment really comes into its own when the kids are off school. It is an extra open space for them to relax and play in, or help with weeding and harvesting; and the site’s communal area can host impromptu football and cricket matches or shared family barbecues during the long summer holiday. This is, of course, the six-week break that Gove wants to move, reduce or traduce because he sees it as an anachronistic throwback to a seasonal rural economy. Well, some of us depend on these holidays in the sun and are still governed more by that cyclical, regenerative calendar than we are by the diktats of the hard-nosed metropolitan political elite.