'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)

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

Porridge weather

I must get up and help clear the drive but first I'll have porridge. "How I detest this snow" mutters my mother who feels trapped by it.

I (and the Oscar in his fur) free to put on long socks, long johns, trews, thick vest, shirt, jumper and Harris Tweed jacket plus neck warmer and gloves, wearing Sealskin oversocks with my Viking Dry boots - far cheaper than footwear from most hiking shops (tho' their price has risen since they've been 'discovered') - rejoice in the crunching of the pristine snow, the blanketed trees, the laced upper branches, the trickle of the water between gaps in the ice on the river, the grey sheep and the black cattle moving slowly across a whitened landscape and the light on the snow reflecting upward like the sun on the sea.

* * *

Might there be a tipping point at which it becomes politically possible to bring Tony Blair to the International Criminal Court at the Hague for ordering the invasion of Iraq? Corfucius has coined the term 'Poodlegate' - using words and pictures that captures my anger at this man's deeds and subsequent comportment in the public arena.

My friend, and some time legal representative, Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, has helped write the book on the legal position. He and his legal colleagues failed to get the invasion of Iraq declared illegal by the House of Lords on the grounds - effectively - of droit de seigneur. Sovereign immunity is the formal term. A head of state can be arraigned for private acts deemed illegal (acta jure gestionis) but not public ones. The concept of acta jure imperii decrees that the word 'illegal' has no meaning in this context - a more sophisticated answer to the question 'why treason never prospers.'

Until the 1950s sovereign immunity was near absolute. In 1976 The Council of Europe adopted the European Convention on State Immunity, signed in Basle on 16 May 1972 . In 2004 the United Nations, which has been working on state immunity for decades, finalized a conditional approach which lacks the ratifying number of signatures.

Shiner is focusing on specific cases of abuse in Iraq. Blair, as tricky to handcuff as jelly, is protected by friends in the mountainous terrain of plausible deniability, but over the next decade the connection between his character and the consequences of his decisions will be strengthened, written, witnessed.

(My position: My family has served in the military; my daughter is in the police. I vote fairly regularly for Labour, locally and nationally, though a supporter of Margaret Thatcher in her early years and have a family tradition of supporting and working for what might be called 'the establishment' - with a string of minor honours to our name from CMG through OBE to a knighthood; schooled at Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Oxford and Cambridge, with, in my case, additional association with American universities - Pennsylvania and Michigan. My animus towards Tony Blair is that he started a war. He turned us from being 'the good guys' - defending ourselves from the Armada, Napoleon, Hitler and the Argentinian dictator, into something quite the opposite. He invaded another country. He stirs in me my own fears of self-deception about how 'we' - the British - should comport ourselves. Calling on the same symbolism, he broke the thread of Our Island Story.)

The temperature is down to -11°C but the air's dry and it doesn't feel that cold. I cleared more snow from the track to the house. The car wouldn't start. An AA man who came out swiftly, despite high demand for his help, and walked up the track with me to the house - not wanting to risk his van getting stuck - borrowing a hair drier to melt ice from the filter. Then we left the engine running for 30 minutes. Tomorrow we expect more snow. I will try to get the car down to the road and back tomorrow. Had we a horse and cart we'd not have this difficulty over hardly a foot of snow.

Dusk came and a light sleet began. Indoors it's warm with a log fire. My mum and I watched a DVD of Ten Canoes. What an amazing film - an absorbing rambling story told by David Gulpilil:

'Bout time to tell you a story, eh? Then I'll tell you one of ours...It is longtime ago. It is our time, before you other mob came from cross the ocean...longtime before then...Ahh, you gotta see this story of mine cause it'll make you laugh, even if you're not a blackfella. Might cry a bit too eh? But then you laugh some more...cause this story is a big true story of my people. True thing.

* * * So the car - a Fiat Sedici with 4 wheel drive - just skids on the driveway when I try to get it just a few feet out of its shelter. Taking it out of Brin Croft's icy sloping drive and then down the hill to public road is impractical. Winter tyres are for obvious reasons in very short supply. Indeed the British seem to be quite unfamiliar with them. "We can have some for in early January - £279 for a fitted pair" says a tyre supplier in Inverness. Others offer the same at far higher prices. We've still to get the car down there for fitting and the weather isn't set to change in a hurry. I learn to my surprise that snow chains - which I could have bought by credit card and had brought to the foot of the track by taxi - are now illegal in the UK. Apparently on the continent it's illegal not to have them. There's some novel device called an autosock that can be fitted to tyres but they seem to be an idea in cyberspace. We've no salt. We are this country's unpreparedness for heavy snow in microcosm. Meantime we've arranged for a friend with a more powerful 4 x 4 to be on hand if there's an emergency with mum, who'll also meet me or Sharon at the end of the drive if she's heading for the shops in Inverness. The ridiculous thing is that I only have to wheel my bicycle to the end of the track and I could then cycle into town because the main public roads are well salted.

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A couple of hours later and the problem's sorted. Found Ness City Tyres on Harbour Road on the web. Phoned. They happened to have a pair of exactly the right size winter tyres - £207 fitted. Sharon and I used a mixture of digging, salting, carpets under wheels, more digging and rocking back and forth to get out of the drive. It took us an hour and a half of graft to get the car along barely 50 yards to the gate onto to the track, after which the going was easy, with the A9 clear to Inverness. Tyres fitted in 30 minutes. Coming home they pulled us up the driveway without a pause. Lesson learned.

The low road home to Inverarnie