It's a long way from Potenza in southern Italy to the west side of Watford. Vincenzo Santarsiero, 78, made the journey in 1970, and began working locally as a carpenter – as well as tending an allotment on a site known as Farm Terrace. According to his daughter, Rosangela, this was not a matter of recreation: her father could not read or write, and was limited in his job prospects – so growing his own fruit and vegetables was an essential means of feeding his family.
Vincenzo is still there, and these days the two of them see to three plots. They grow an amazing variety of stuff: white and black figs, cherries, apples, artichokes and Italian crops such as cicerchie, a variety of chickpea. The soil here, they tell me, is beyond compare, thanks to the fact that the allotments – first opened in 1896 – are on the site of a former sewage works.
There are around 60 working plots on the Farm Terrace site, which is overlooked by Watford general hospital, and mere yards from the home of Watford FC. Now, in partnership with the corporate developer the Kier Group in a financial arrangement called a "local asset-backed vehicle", Watford borough council – led by its elected Lib Dem mayor – wants to clear land it claims is worth £7m and make way for a new "health campus". As far as the allotment holders understand it, two-fifths of the development will be set aside for a new extension to the hospital, though when that might materialise is unclear. The rest will be given over to development they expect will be completed much more quickly, and which seems to have little connection to health at all: houses, along with "business incubator and retail units", a hotel, restaurants, cafes and "urban public piazzas" – all mouthwateringly close to the M25.
On 14 May approval for the land's change of use – a legal requirement if allotments are going to be concreted over – was granted by the communities secretary, Eric Pickles. As a result, the campaigners' only hope is to have his decision overturned by judicial review. If they lose, they will be offered new space on other sites, where many gardeners claim the quality of the soil is hugely inferior – and in any case, creating new plots will be a huge job. Certainly, Vincenzo Santasiero is not interested: "If I have to start again from scratch – no way," he says, with no little disdain.
Rising tensions between the council and the Farm Terrace gardeners are reflected in a tangle of claims and counter-claims. The allotment holders say the new plots are mostly over two miles away; the council says the extra distance people will have to travel will be no more than a mile. The council emphasises the need for the hospital extension, new housing and jobs, and assures local gardeners it has "agreed to invest an additional £800,000 for improvements to our allotment sites"; the plot holders say they have no confidence this money will materialise. They also point to an earlier plan for the "health campus" that left their allotments intact, but the council say the recession has changed things, and "the delivery of any major, long-term, mixed use scheme … [is] more complex and potentially more financially precarious".
Among the most vocal of the Farm Terrace gardeners is Sara Jane Trebar, a 40-year-old full-time mum who has had a plot here for five years, and whose specialities include raspberries and parsnips. "Emotionally, it's been very hard," she says. "The thing is, how could you recreate somewhere like this? And I'm worried about the detrimental effect that getting rid of these plots will have on people's health. For a lot of us, this is physical work – but there's also the emotional release you get." Plenty of research backs this up: eight years ago, a University of Loughborough study found that regular gardening had a clearly positive effect on the "physical and mental health, wellbeing and social skills" of vulnerable adults; more recently, work done at the University of Exeter found that urban horticulturists had relatively low levels of "psychological distress" and high ratings for "life satisfaction".
The basic outlines of the Farm Terrace story are increasingly common, all over the country. Allotments are in demand, thanks to revived interest in fruit and vegetable growing, and the thrifty culture embedded in the long aftermath of the financial crash. But the selfsame economic conditions seem to be leading councils to look at their land holdings, and put up some for redevelopment.
In March this year, the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners claimed that whereas it once received enquiries about threats to allotments at the rate of around one a week, the frequency had since increased to a call a day. In 2012, one of their surveys revealed that the greatest worry for 74% of allotment holders was the selling off of their plots. There is, perhaps, something about traditional allotments that sits awkwardly with modern local government, the British model of capitalism, and the ties that bind the two – as proved by one particular story which peaked six years ago, when 83 people were evicted from the century-old Manor Farm allotments in East London as part of preparations for the 2012 Olympics, making way for what one campaigner called a "four-week concrete pathway".
There are around 300,000 allotments in the UK, and more than 100,000 people whose names are on waiting lists. Two years ago, Eric Pickles' department floated plans to relieve local authorities of their obligations to provide "sufficient" allotments, something enshrined in the Small Holdings and Allotments Act of 1908, a remarkably benevolent bit of legislation which belatedly responded to the huge population shift to towns and cities, and was coloured by the early-20th century's concerns about ordinary folks pursuing wholesome interests rather than drinking their lives away.
There was a huge backlash against the Pickles plan, and the proposals were binned. But as allotment-centred controversies around the country prove, there are still mounting problems. In response, a new campaign has sprung up in Brighton, called Don't Lose the Plot. Its initial spark, in 2012, was an attempt by Brighton and Hove city council – run by the Green party, weirdly enough – to put up rents by 70%. "A lot of us had voted Green imagining that allotments would be high up the agenda, and protected," says Mark Carroll, 45, one of the campaign's organisers. With the help of other political parties, the proposal was beaten, but the campaign has continued, focusing on allotment closures (Carroll mentions ongoing cases in North Yorkshire, Cheshire, Surrey and Essex), rising rents and drastic changes to the size of plots.
"Across the country, councils are trying to shirk their responsibilities by using loopholes in the law," he says. For around 300 years, he explains, the British allotment has been a "10-rod plot", a reference to an imperial measurement that amounts to approximately 250 sq m – but there is no specification in law of any minimum size. About 10 years ago, demand for allotments suddenly jumped, "part of a greater move for people to get back to the land and grow their own food", Carroll reckons. And for the last four years, Brighton council has only allowed new gardeners five-rod plots, meaning that around half the city's allotments are now 50% of their old size.
There are 1,738 people in the city waiting for an allotment. For some, a half-plot is sufficient, but Carrol insists that the council is comparatively land-rich, and that gardeners should have a choice. "If you're trying to grow vegetables to get any degree of self-sufficiency, a half-plot isn't even for your potatoes," he says. "Crop rotation is a non-starter, too. And when you chop a plot in half, you get two sheds, so you lose growing land."
In increasingly crammed allotment sites, Carroll says there is also increasing tension between longstanding gardeners, some of whom have more than one plot, and newcomers whose growing space is that bit smaller. This, perhaps, is one of the factors behind occasional stories about allotments boiling over with bitter disputes, and accusations of harassment and bullying.
"We get posts on our Facebook page saying people are greedy for having a full plot," he tells me. "There are a lot more border disputes happening, with people snatching a bit here and there because they haven't got enough. And it's basically because the council's answer to the waiting list problem wasn't, 'Let's look into opening more sites' but, 'Let's chop them all in half.'"
When I arrive at Barnett Wood Lane allotments in Leatherhead, the first person I meet is 73 year-old Frank Lynes, a sometime professional gardener who has had a plot here for 23 years. Inside five minutes, I realise he is the brother of Roy Lynes, an original member of the rock greats Status Quo. Rather than discussing such frippery, though, Lynes – along with at least 15 other allotment holders – has met me to talk about an increasingly heated local story: Mole Valley borough council's plans to hand the site to a developer. By a strange quirk, they are doing so in partnership with Merton College, Oxford, which owns land close by. Lynes has a map of what's being proposed, which lays out in primary colours what makes the site so enticing: like Farm Terrace in Watford, only more so, it is right next to the M25.
Most of the people I meet are retired, though there are plots here used by much younger gardeners. The Leatherhead Youth Project has an allotment used by people at risk of exclusion from school, some of whom will eventually get a qualification in horticulture. Another plot is used by a charity called LeatherHead Start, which works with homeless people. There is also a smattering of people who started their lives some way away: 34-year-old Sait Buyukertas, for example, is a Turkish Kurd who works as a chef, and says his plot is one of the few places that reminds him of his rural background (he specialises in chickpeas, which apparently taste immeasurably better than either the tinned or dried variety).
The site has been given over the allotments since 1865, when local landowners bequeathed it for use by the local poor. The gardeners here first heard that there were proposals for the site in February. Four developers are apparently interested in building on it: there are local rumours that a distribution centre might be among the plans, though the most commonly mentioned possibilities are "retail and housing".
The council proposes to move the allotment holders to a site right next to the motorway, mention of which prompts a familiar chorus. "It's rotten soil," says Chris Street, 74, a retired industrial chemist.
"I've spoken to somebody who's a farmer, who once thought about taking that site over," says Jenny Day, 66, a former accountant. "And he said, 'No way. I looked at it, and you couldn't grow anything.' There's horrible tufted grass, and where any track has been it's horribly waterlogged." There is also mention of noise and air pollution, inadequate sunlight, the isolation of the land, and two words that will cause any gardener a pang of fear: "heavy clay" (the council insists that any developer will have to work to bring any new allotment site "up to a better or equal standard" to the one that might be built over).
None of the gardeners are sure how the borough council got their name on the deeds to the land, and the people here say that they are having extreme difficulty accessing the relevant documents via freedom of information requests. John Weller, 77, tells me that the site is the only bit of land to which the council can lay claim that isn't in the green belt, which makes it all the more appealing. Local councillors, he says, have talked not just about houses – which, say the allotment-holders, could just as easily be built in local brownfield sites – but also a new hotel and cinema.
When I contact the council, I get an emailed statement from a Tory councillor named Charles Yarwood, who's in charge of Mole Valley's communities and assets portfolio. "It would be remiss of Mole Valley district council if we did not explore the opportunity to market a site which we own and to assess its full potential," it says. The text goes on: "Any such development will provide MVDC with an ongoing financial contribution which could help protect existing services, add a measure of certainty to the council's finances and ensure the council can continue to provide value for money to its residents."
Back at the allotments, all of that is phrased in slightly more blunt language, as proved by a massed answer to a simple question: what do the plot-holders think is driving the plans?
"Money!" says one voice
"Always money," confirms another.
"Money, money, money," says yet another, and the sound of truly mirthless laughter echoes around the greenhouses and sheds.
