'Got the plot' - loss, rediscovery and restoration

Noon in the heart of Handsworth. An attentive assembly, many I know, listen to Adrian Stagg welcoming them to the first new allotments in Birmingham for thirty five years. Adrian and his colleague Mohamed from the City Council had stuck small numbered flags at the edge of each of the 79 plots on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments. Shortlisted applicants strolled around picking a flag from the plot of their choice; taking it back to the community hut to sign a contract and pay rent to September. At last. Some began digging and planting at once.

Opening day of the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

The entrance to the Victoria Jubilee Allotments is to the east between plots 79 and 77, via the Parklands estate, entered off Hamstead Road via Victoriana Way, opposite a children's nursery and almost opposite Wellesbourne Road in Handsworth, Birmingham. On the west side of the plots the railway to Walsall runs through a cutting, to the south are the new playing fields - not ready yet - and to the north, Handsworth Park. The plots lie on a gentle north facing slope, overlooked on the east side by new houses. The gardeners' communal hut is close to the entrance between plots 25, 35 and 36.

Plan of plots on the VJA

From Nick Booth for the BBC: :-)

Losing the Plot - Midland Report BBC 2000 from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
...and VJA slideshow including images of the old Victoria Jubilee Allotments and here are some of Birmingham photographer Luke Unsworth's images on YouTube taken in 2004 just before the site was cleared.

Luke Unsworth's images of the abandoned Victoria Jubilee in 2004

Originally the Victoria Jubilee Allotments were private - plots provided by the church to working men at the end of the 19th century, who joined together in a Provident Association or Friendly Society. Plots covered the whole 17 acre site. Clark Homes, then Westbury Homes, succeeded by Charles Church and finally Persimmon Homes persuaded the committee of the private plotholders to sell their plots and take the profits. Nick Booth's BBC film - Losing the Plot - documented this process in 2000, showing how allotment sites were being lost all over the country, as ageing plotholders, tempted by the cash offered by developers, sold up. Not all wanted this but they were overruled by a majority. The Victoria Jubilee Allotments Association being a Friendly Society, were prohibited by their constitution from selling plots, but the VJA Committee with the aid of Midland solicitors Challinors Lyon Clark changed themselves into a holding company which were able to sell the allotments and take the substantial profits that went with selling them for building.

The developer's initial masterplan involved covering the whole 17 acre site with unimaginative housing - a plan that met with prolonged, skillfully orchestrated and well argued opposition both locally and from green space defenders across Birmingham over nearly 15 years. Eventually the developers 'won', but resistance to the loss of the site helped Birmingham City Council negotiate a planning gain agreement (S106A) that saved two thirds of the site for greenspace, that would include the largest new allotment site in the UK since WW2, and the first new allotment site opened in Birmingham since 1975. The developer built private houses on just one third of the site. Under a planning application, finally approved in April 2004, two thirds of the site was allocated to playing fields and allotments paid for by the developer under a S106A - or planning gain agreement. The houses that were eventually built weren't ticky tacky, but handsome Victorian style houses laid out in a creative way, overlooking a restored Handsworth Park. A good few residents have taken up plots just outside their back door.

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THE ORIGINAL CASE FOR THE OLD VJA

In 1999 journalist Miles Blackley produced and directed a seven minute film for the BBC Community Programme Unit about our campaign to save the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (VJA). Miles' brief included playing up the role of the individual activist in local campaigns which is why the 'I' word gets such an airing, belying the swell of local community support for our campaign to prevent or reduce building over the VJA.

Victoria Jubilee Allotments: BBC Private Investigations 1999

By 2003 we'd assembled, with the help of fellow campaigners, especially John Richfield, Liz England and our lawyer Phil Shiner, a cogent written case to Birmingham City Council planners, proposing that the whole 17 acres (6.8 hectares) of the original Victoria Jubilee Allotments to allotments be saved for allotments. This included making what I still believe to be an irrefutable evidence-based argument that local demand for allotments was enough to ensure that all original 240 plots would, if the site were properly maintained, be taken up, This bundle also contained information about just how much private plotholders no longer living in the area would be likely to make if the site was sold to a private developer, given the numbers of plots some had accrued to themselves and their families some of whom had never been near a plot, while allowing the site to become run-down (what we termed 'malign neglect' or 'constructive non-maintenance' [NB: HM govt publication links seem slow or not working - 14/06/10]); refusing to let plots to those asking for them, including me, while at the same time arguing publicly that they had no option but to sell because there was "no demand for plots".

The case for the VJA made by The Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG) (appendices in a separate file or via links below)

Appendix 1: Single Regeneration Budget (SRB6) showing VJA unit 8

Appendix 2: Edwardian 'fringe belt' - hard & soft surfaces in the city

Appendix 3: 3 views of the VJA site

Appendix 4: HAIG’s alternative proposal

Appendix 5: Survey of allotment demand

Appendix 6: VJA shareholdings

Appendix 7: VJA wildlife survey

Support in the Unitary Development Plan 1993 for allotments. Para. 3.62

Slides of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments

12 June - receipt for our plot on the VJA (photo: Richard Baddeley)

* * *
30 January 1972. Saville Inquiry into the events on Bloody Sunday delivered this Monday afternoon

Kanun and the public law of Europe

'a country in sight of Italy is less known than the wilds of America'

D'Anville quoted by Gibbon c.1788 Photo: Stephen Sommerhalter

'Different cultures, different behaviours. Two months ago, Albania lodged its formal application for EU membership and suddenly the two ends of Europe fall into place...'

Richard Pine, Director of the Durrell School in Corfu, has written in the Irish Times* about something new to me. His intriguing 'letter from Corfu' reminds me of a frequently repeated 18th century observation** that Albania, though visible from Italy, was less known than the interior of America:

Oh we're back in the Balkans again

Back to the joy and the pain

What if it burns or it blows or it snows?

We're back to the Balkans again.

Back, where to-morrow the quick may be dead

With a hole in his heart or a ball in his head

Back, where the passions are rapid and red

Oh, we're back to the Balkans again.

Preface of the 1908 book 'High Albania'

Kulla by Melanie Reimer ~ 'read High Albania by Edith Durham' and Lin has given me a present of Edward Lear's Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece & Albania

So Club Méditerranée have withdrawn from Kakome Bay, a few miles north of Saranda on the Albanian coast. A part of me thought that local villagers protesting against Club Med might have had an environmental agenda, but it was a long running complicated and divisive dispute over whether local families or the state had the right to profit from the sale of the land to build a resort, with Club Med agents unclear whether to deal with locals or the state Agency for the Restitution and Compensation of Property...

Drini Çano argues in stilted and stultifying Euronglish legalese that Albania’s incomplete property restitution process, under way for the past 20 years,  has violated the nation’s constitution and jeopardized its effort to attract foreign investments and accede to the European Union. To make his case, the author focuses on the Albanian Property Restitution and Compensation Agency (PRCA). Instead of a team of “administrative judges”, this is a board of potentially corruptible political appointees, a phenomenon that reflects on micro-scale the many pathologies of post-Communism. 

As we approach important Albanian elections, on 28 June, the Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, speaks of flytipping and sewage problems damaging his country's formal application to join the EU.

To join the EU my colleague Gill Bentley tells me...

...applicant countries have to accede to the acquis, and meet the Copenhagen criteria, which includes such things as the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect and protection of minorities, a functioning market economy and capacity to cope with competitive pressures and market forces, and ability to take on the obligations of membership, including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union (see).

Albania has various 'enlargement' projects in train, but see this, for example, on Tirana:

...estimated to be one of the most polluted cities in the world, behind New Delhi and Beijing...deaths due to illnesses caused by pollution have increased by 20% in Tirana in the past two years... respiratory system diseases came third on the list of causes of death last year. As Albania gears up to join the EU, pollution troubles get in the way. Albania is facing a humanitarian catastrophe due to growing pollution, 10 times above the tolerance level set by the World Health Organizations (WHO)....(ref)

Less public attention and equally, if not more problematic, is a different kind of pre-Islamic left-over that requires an understanding of Albanian - even Illyrian history - before the Ottoman Invasions of Europe - the lethal phenomenon of kanun. Uninformed outsiders may ask innocent questions about the stone towers - kullas - dotted around the country, unaware they were built as sanctuaries for the potential targets of blood feuds legitimated by the Code of Lekë Dukagjini five and half centuries ago - the basis of another Balkan 'big idea' - via the Kosovo connection.

I was intrigued on looking further into this to find young Albanians (Shqiptarët), in our wired world, had continued the spirit of the kanun as hip hop, and I've just been told about the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who's novel Broken April I've ordered.

[see Tanya Mangalakova's paper for the International Centre for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR) THE KANUN IN PRESENT-DAY ALBANIA, KOSOVO, AND MONTENEGRO and this image and text]

As well as the EU, OSCE will presumably continue to give attention to creating and maintaining government in Albania' no doubt discussing her EU candidacy at the meeting in Corfu next weekend a hundred and fifty years after that twelve week visit to Greece by William Gladstone, a 19th century colossus of British politics. I’m studying his engrossment with the ‘public law of Europe’ via his extraordinary mission to the Ionian islands in 1858-59, seeing, in a biographer's words, ‘the Ionian microcosm' as 'a task worthy of macrocosmic devotion’. Richard Shannon wrote ‘it is possible to deduce much at large about Gladstone immersed in this small episode’, and I suspect it may be possible to find ‘much at large’ about Corfu immersed in what, for the Ionians, was a large episode in their 19th century history. 'In many ways, it seems to me, Gladstone's interlude as High Commissioner in the Ionian Islands encapsulates as well as anything his urge to hold the world in Peelite tutelage. ' (response to a review of his two volume biography of WEG). Gladstone, in his famous diaries, wrote of being utterly absorbed 'in the affairs of these little islands...The complexity of the case is inversely (so to speak) as the extent of the sphere.' (31 Dec 1858)

A very recent and welcome acquaintance, a scholar on Corfu, wrote to say 'He was like Durrell - a philhellene paid to do a brit's job - keep the islands safe from the Greeks, even though you know in your heart that enosis is the right path.'

This is going to be fascinating.

* * * I got news by phone on Saturday that Liz England has died. I dug out a photo (c.2001) of Liz - in the maroon raincoat on the right - when, as Chair of the Handsworth Park Association, she along with Dick Pratt and John Richfield, led our successful 12 year lobby for the park's restoration.

On the far left is Hilary Taylor of Hilary Taylor Landscape Associates who advised on Birmingham City Council's bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund and after its success oversaw the improvement work giving advice and making recommendations. The man centre left is Adrian Rourke, manager of Birmingham City Council's Landscape Practice Group who, over six years, co-ordinated the work of restoring Handsworth Park from preparation of the successful funding bid to the park's re-opening in summer 2006. I'm at the back, in a yellow top, chatting to a ministerial minder. In the red coat is the minister. I'm embarrassed that I cannot recall her name - her tenure was so brief. Liz, after being ill for the last year, died on 15 June 2009. She was a local hero, stalwart campaigner, politically astute, a friend and a good person. Her funeral will be at 1.00pm at West Bromwich Crematorium on June 30.

* * *

Εκτός από τισ τυφλέσ δυνάμεισ τησ φύσησ,

τίποτα δε κινείται σε αυτον τον κόσμο

το οποιο δεν είναι Ελληνικά στην καταγωγη

Meantime in Athens, sublime, wonderful, the opening of the New Athens Museum, another step in restoring the narrative of the contest between Athena and Poseidon.

The place it honours I knew from childhood schooling, on which I gazed on in 1957 through the small window of Yiayia's loo in her flat in Kolonaki after a train journey from London and on whose almost empty stone floor I walked that same April on a grey rainy day with my half brother George and Nigel Greenhill, son of the diplomat. As a paeon for Greece I know Maine's words are compromised by their context but they ring for me:

This quote is from Henry Maine's 1875 Rede Lecture - The Effects of observation of India on Modern European Thought - aimed at impressing upon a Cambridge audience the richness of India's contribution to world thought, through drama, comparative philology and mythology and the possibility that 'it may yet give us a new science not less valuable than the sciences of language and of folk-lore.' So Greece was a means, including the backhander - 'results far greater than any exhibited in Greece itself' - for Maine to talk of Britain's role in India.

[*I read Richard Pine's piece a week before it was published. A message from another informant suggests I learn about 'Arvanites and Qameria'. I am reminded of the scale of my ignorance. Yes I had heard of Chams but... ]

[Back to the future: see 'Albania: short on homework for joining the EU 15 July 2009]

[**This comment of Gibbon's was, so far as I can find, first quoted by James David Bourchier in the piece on Albania he wrote for the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. It's in footnote 23 in Part 1 of Chap 32 of the fourth volume of History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (click footnote 23; search for 'Ambracia'). Gibbon relates a comment on Albania by the great 18th century cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville in his Memoires de l' Académie, tome xxxii, p. 513 - 528, illustrating the Gulf of Ambracia,

‘but he cannot ascertain the situation of Dodona. A country in sight of Italy is less known than the wilds of America.’

The Ambracian Gulf is by Preveza well south of Corfu. Dordona is level with Corfu but deep within Epirus. The reference to 'sight' refers to the view, on a clear day, from Italy, fifty miles over the fearsome Strait of Otranto to the 4000 feet mountains of the Karaburan Peninsular]

The Straits of Otranto from a map by Jean D'Anville (1697-1782) who instead of the inventions inserted by many earlier mapmakers would leave blank those areas that remained unknown to him

[26 July 09: See the Balkan Peace Park Project and Robin Hanbury-Tenison praising Albania on YouTube and again on Sandy Toksvig's Excess Baggage BBC R4]

[5 August 09: See an account of the Corfu Channel Incident in October 1946]