Don't lose the plot - grow your own veggies

Another Life:  My father cut a trapdoor in the floorboards of our small terraced house in Brighton, to turn its earthen foundations into a (kneeling-room-only) root-cellar. Here, each year throughout the second World War, he stored a whole winter's potatoes, along with bags of carrots, swedes and parsnips, all harvested from our allotment in the park across the road. I offer this piece of vertical thinking to the enterprising people of Fingal, now queueing up in hundreds to rent allotments from the county council.

In the depressed 1980s, I was urging the unemployed of Dublin to agitate for space in which to grow their own food, both to save money and to eat well. Today, the urge to grow fresh and wholesome food is quite independent of income. It's also interesting that the first World War found Belfast offering 1,200 allotments, which were rented across the social spectrum, while Dublin's mere 80 plots were all taken up by the working class.

There's heavy cultural stuff in the history of allotments, to do with industrialisation, population movements, national notions of husbandry and patriotism. Today there are added dimensions of personal and communal activism. No wonder one UK university offers "the political ecology of allotments and communal gardens" as a post-grad research topic.

Even before the last war, Brighton had one allotment for every 16 families, and the end of it found every park and chalky hillside of the suburbs as a maze of one-16th-of-an-acre plots bristling with runner-bean wigwams, little wooden toolsheds, rain-barrels and greenhouses.

These were just a few of the 1.5 million allotments on which Britons had dug for victory.

At the turn of the century, this national figure had fallen to about 250,000, but a recent strong upsurge in allotmenteering is common to both islands. As women, in particular, tune in to green concerns, the attractions of a family "dacha", yielding organic produce, herbs and flowers, can be a life-changing ambition. At the new eco-village designed for Cloughjordan in North Tipperary, one-third of the 67 acres will be taken up by allotments.

As every vacant square metre of Dublin becomes paved with gold, it is hardly surprising that the city has lost the allotment plot. South Dublin County Council has promised new plots at Lucan to replace the 115 it is losing to development. And as the gardens of new housing developments become more and more like token patios, Fingal County Council is looking for more green space for allotments: temporary plots on land it lets to farmers, and permanent allotments in parkland.

Outside Belfast, in a telling private development, a farm has been turned into a "horticultural haven" for citydwellers, who can rent plots of any size within a 20-minute drive of Donegall Square. Vista Allotments (panoramas from Stormont to Strangford Lough) lays on water, loos and barbecues, supplies sheds, polytunnels and compost bins, offers secure crop storage and will even cart manure.

Here is a rural diversification whose time has come. But the original social good that fired the allotment movement now has extra, sorely-needed ecological benefits: allotments are good for nature.

Grassland sown for silage, closely mown in parks, or in wedges between council estates, offers green space but not much else. Creating wildflower meadows in urban parks, as Belfast City Council notably has done, is a big improvement. But allotments run organically have their own ecological exuberance, with a riot of plant and insect life in which people feel naturally at home.

Yes, but what about young vandals, drug and cider parties, trampled onions and lettuces, smashed-up greenhouses and condoms in the sheds? Such things are known, even in the best-hedged locations. It is what could make farm-based allotments, at a safe remove from the suburbs, such an attractive proposition.

The allotment pages of www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk (every hometown should have one) do their best to reassure. Beyond Poets' Corner, growing allotment herbs for "holistic therapists", comes a city-fringe council estate, of dismal notoriety in my youth, that now has a brave "forest garden" of allotments. Vandalism, according to the website, is "almost negligible, and yet we probably have some of the worst kids round here on the site: they know where our tools are, they could smash the place up and that, and yet they don't. It's their community food project, it's their community garden as much as anyone else's".

Children in one class at the primary school even grow garlic, to indulge a taste for garlic bread.