Losing Common Land

Greater London has grown to its current geographical size over two millennia. Today, Greater London occupies 600 square miles, but up until the 17th century, it was largely contained within the square mile of the City of London. The surrounding area was largely rural. London was founded by the Romans as Londinium around 43 AD, roughly occupying the square mile of the modern day City of London. When the Romans left Britain, the invading Saxons took over Londinium, and established isolated farmsteads in the surrounding countryside. Several of these survive as towns today, denoted by their Saxon names (ending in -ham, -ton, -wich, -worth). Throughout the Middle Ages, London grew both in terms of numbers of people and land covered. However, it was during the course of the Industrial Revolution that London’s population exploded. Between 1714 and 1840, the population rose from 630,000 to 2 million people, becoming the largest city in the world. Increasingly, roads linked the city to the surrounding villages - many of which had developed on and around previous farmsteads. By 1880, the population stood at around 6 million. In the years preceding World War 2 this again rose, but more slowly, to a peak of 8.61 million in 1940. Following the Second World War, the population of London declined. One in six buildings in London had been destroyed during the war, and in the following years there was a large rebuilding programme. The improvement of transport links, expanded incomes, ‘slum’ clearance and lack of space in the city encouraged many to move to the suburbs. This meant that the inner London boroughs became much less densely populated, and the wider metropolitan area expanded. In total, population declined by around 22% between 1939 and 1988, to 6.7 million, with the biggest declines in inner London, but has been rising again since 1991, and was projected to surpass its previous peak by 2015. Despite this only recently reversed decline, London has physically expanded by 60% in the past 100 years; Londoners are now less densely housed and using more land than the same sized population did in the early twentieth century. As London has grown, the city has subsumed hamlets, market towns, suburbs, industrial areas and farmsteads, which have become neighbourhoods.

Market gardening, the cultivation of vegetables for sale, was first introduced to Britain in the 16th century by Flemish immigrants granted the right to settle in the town of Sandwich in Kent by Elizabeth I. The practice soon spread to London to supply a growing demand for “garden luxuries”. Market gardens were generally established close to the Thames and its tributaries for water supply, and were also able to source manure from London’s horse stables. By 1796 Daniel Lysons calculated that “five thousand acres [over two thousand hectares], within twelve miles of the metropolis” was being cultivated for the supply of the London markets with garden vegetables. In addition 325 ha were being cropped with fruit (primarily in the west London areas of Brentford, Isleworth, Twickenham, Hammersmith, Kensington, and Plumstead), and about 690 ha cultivated for potatoes (primarily in the east London neighbourhoods of Barking, Ilford, Eastham, Leyton, and West Ham). He identified that during this period Fulham, in south west London, had the greatest areas of market gardens at 325 ha. Market gardening reached its peak in the 18th century and was displaced by the rapid expansion of London during the 19th century which drove up land values for development.

An expansion of the built environment exerts pressure on the space available for agricultural production. This can be driven by population growth - for example when demand for housing during the Industrial Revolution quickened the process by which landowners enclosed common land in the capital - but is not necessarily, as we see from London’s twentieth century history. In particular, how densely housing and other buildings are built, the space people expect, the infrastructure built to facilitate urban life, as well as the regulations and planning rules that determine the shape of the city, all mediate whether population growth exerts pressure on space for food production. As well as housing and commercial development, other uses compete for space in the urban environment, from leisure facilities, to parks, to private gardens. The risk of urban sprawl motivated the creation of London’s Green Belt in the 1930s; an open area of land surrounding the city with planning protections to curtail the outward spread of development. The Green Belt still makes up 19% of London’s ground area, but is under constant threat from other land uses.

In more recent years, the banks of the River Lea have been earmarked not just for building construction (though this continues apace) but also for recreation and economic activity in the form of the Olympic Park - resulting in further loss of food growing space, such as allotment plots.

More recently the Lea Valley has also been the site of a revival of these residualised practices, with the development of community led and cooperative food growing organisations such as OrganicLea, London Grown and the Wolves Lane Consortium who have taken leases on public growing and amenity land, and disused municipal plant nurseries, to revive the tradition of market gardening and horticulture in the area.

Despite the pressures of development and renewed population growth London has managed to retain much of its green and open space. Around 40% of London’s land area is green, and over a third of the land area is classified as open space. In New York and Paris the figures are 14% and less than 10% respectively. Its story is therefore less one of a city that has been built over, but of changing land use; pushing food growing into corners and out of the city. However, we can also see examples of communities who are drawing on this history of farming, and individual food growing, within the city, to push for policy and funding frameworks which support food growing as an essential part of the urban landscape, to resist continuing land privatisation, and to realise its potential to tackle a range of social, economic and environmental issues affecting the city and its inhabitants.