The living standards of the rural poor suffered a severe decline in the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of high population growth, changing agricultural practices, enclosure and the decline of rural industries. Allotment provision was the most important counterweight to the pressures. This book offers the first systematic analysis of the early nineteenth-century allotment movement, providing new data on the chronology of the movement and on the number, geographical distribution, size, rents, cultivation yields and effect on living standards of allotments, showing how the movement brought the culture of the rural labouring poor more closely into line with the mainstream values of respectable mid-Victorian England. This book casts new light on central aspects of early and mid-nineteenth-century social and economic history, agriculture and rural society. JEREMY BURCHARDT is lecturer in Rural History, University of Reading.

[This book] is about more than the early allotment movement: it is a book about changing rural, social and class consciousness, [and] about the creation of a social consensus and about domestic and cultural life.'

Source: Garden History

An excellent study of the heretofore-almost-ignored allotment movement.. The value of [this] book, for having opened to scrutiny this little-studied facet of 19th century life, is incontrovertible.'

Source: Albion

Breaks new ground as the first substantial scholarly account of allotments in c19th England. [.] Rescue[s] allotments from their positions at the margins of historical inquiry. Burchardt's book makes a compelling case that allotments deserve more attention than they have hitherto received, and sets a high standard for the research that will surely follow.'

Source: Landscape History