The Working Man’s Green Space: Allotment Gardens in England, France, and Germany, 1870–1919 by Micheline Nilsen (review)

The first time I encountered an allotment garden, I had no idea what it was. I was visiting Europe and staying on the outskirts of Zurich. I was wandering one night after missing the last tram when I came upon an extensive allotment garden along a hillside. I marveled at the neatly gridded landscape filled with late summer’s harvest, each plot containing its own tiny cottage. To my impressionable eyes, the place seemed truly magical—a miniaturized rural utopia. When I began to study the history of gardens years later, I found myself returning to the memory of this hillside often: there, a spark of curiosity, an inchoate realization that a garden was more than a place of recreation or source of food but a profound expression of place and culture.

I remembered this scene and reflected on the multivalent garden while reading Micheline Nilsen’s A Working Man’s Green Space, which focuses on allotment gardens created in England, France, and Germany between 1870 and 1919. Nilsen, an urban historian, begins by defining the allotment garden: small in size, in a location separate from a dwelling, and used to cultivate food for the gardener. At the turn of the twentieth century, these gardens became a widespread urban phenomenon, one of the many new types of landscapes and institutions devised to help the urban poor in response to the unprecedented upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. A range of individuals and groups created—and advocated for—these gardens, including philanthropic organizations, employers, landowners, religious leaders, and ultimately city and national governments. As Nilsen deftly illustrates, “Much more was at stake in these gardens than the provision of vegetables and a few flowers” (1).

Interweaving landscape history and social history, Nilsen investigates three main areas of inquiry: the use and effectiveness of allotment gardens as a social program; their relationship to other landscapes and forms of land use; and the experiences of the gardeners. The study ends with World War I, during which the governments of the countries in question promoted allotment gardening as essential to the war effort to supplement food supply. This support contributed to their lasting presence in many European cities after the war, despite some interruptions and shifts in purpose. Nilsen concludes the book discussing their enduring impact, including their current status.

Nilsen approaches this history by first presenting primary motivations for creating allotment gardens, and she outlines common features and organizational structures shared among the three countries under study. This initial chapter is followed by one on each country offering a detailed history of its allotment garden movement, including local antecedents and specific examples. Most previous scholarship on the topic has focused on individual places, making Nilsen’s a novel approach that reinforces overarching themes while drawing out regional variations. (A comparably ambitious study worth noting is Laura Lawson’s City Bountiful on the history of community gardening in America.)¹ What Nilsen finds is that most allotment gardens were conceived as a way to help the poor, and while food was a major part of this assistance, their creators and supporters also hoped gardens would provide a number of other less tangible benefits.

The chapter on Germany presents several examples. There were gardens that industrial concerns created for employees as a benefit—a way to retain workers—and also to potentially quell subversive political activity. Other gardens were created by private philanthropies to promote health and relieve the stresses of urban life but also to distract workers from its allures, such as drinking. As the allotment garden movement grew, a number of associations were formed to support gardeners and acquire land; in some cases they managed the rental of the land from municipalities and other owners. During World War...