The original plans for the park made no provision for allotments although they already existed in three places. In the southern area of Exhibition Fields, behind Upper Knollys Terrace, they lay either side of the informal path that ran between Pennycomequick and Home Park. In the north of the park, there were allotments in the areas between the disused reservoirs and Barn Park Road, and between Pounds House and Peverell Park Road on the north side of Venn Lane.
The area behind Upper Knollys Terrace covered 39 acres and supported about 500 allotment holders. They were given 3 months’ notice to quit before 30th September 1930 so that the land could be incorporated into the layout for Central Park. Many of them had left produce in the ground to ripen having been given to understand that they would be allowed a week or so in which to garner it. To their astonishment, however, on the very day the notices to quit expired, their allotments were overrun by women and children, principally the former, who proceeded to help themselves to what they pleased. One allotment holder told the Western Morning News that some of the women were well dressed and had the forethought to bring large bags which they filled to capacity. When he remonstrated with them, they retorted that it was anybody’s property.
Some of the evicted tenants were found new plots on an extension to the Penlee Valley allotments, but this was only 10 acres of new land compared with 39 acres before.
Laying out the park between 1930 and 1931 took some of the Exhibition Fields allotment land for the new nursery but, by 1933, there were increasing calls for the remainder to be brought back into cultivation. Unemployment remained high and these temporary allotments would have been one way to provide a useful and productive activity for some without jobs. The proposal was put to the Hoe and Parks Committee but they rejected it. Instead, the area above the southern slopes was let as pasture, with horses and cows being grazed there until it became a temporary rugby pitch in 1937.
The allotment holders on the Barn Park allotments and the northern section of the Peverell Park allotments were left undisturbed in 1930 as their spaces were not so critical to the park’s overall design. Furthermore, plans for the recently purchased land at Barn Park had yet to be produced. It means that these two allotment areas have been in continuous cultivation since at least 1928 when they were photographed in an aerial survey.
The Swarthmore allotments
The inter-war years were a period of conspicuous philanthropy and the mayor was expected to lend his patronage to the city’s charitable work. The mayor in 1932-33 was Richard Runnals Oke who established the Mayor’s Committee for the Social Welfare of the Unemployed, an umbrella group to co-ordinate the different organisations that were working to provide activities for the unemployed. One such organisation was the Plymouth Guild of Social Service which had been founded several years previously by James Joseph Judge. He had come to Plymouth from Dublin in the early 1900s and was editor of the Western Evening Herald until 1921 and assistant editor of the Independent newspaper until 1946. There is more about him in the J. J. Judge papers held by The Box.
Between Oke and Judge, they persuaded the Hoe and Parks Committee to lease an area slightly to the east of the former Exhibition Fields allotments. The agreement signed on 27th April 1933 was between the Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of the City of Plymouth (“the Corporation”) and the Mayor’s Committee for the Social Welfare of the Unemployed, with J. J. Judge acting for the latter. He undertook that the “seven acres three roods and ten perches or thereabouts” of temporary allotments would be solely for the use of unemployed persons.
The inaugural meeting of the new scheme had already taken place the previous month. It was chaired by Mayor Oke and held in Swarthmore Hall, Mutley, and this seems to be the most likely reason why the allotments have become known as the Swarthmore allotments.
(The Box accession reference 94/9)
A further agreement was made between the same parties ten months later for a southerly extension so that the allotments reached down to Central Park Avenue.
The ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign in the Second World War saw the Swarthmore allotments being extended westwards all the way to Upper Knollys Terrace. Some plots were taken back in 1947 to make space for prefab bungalows and the remainder followed later to make the Endeavour Hill path the allotments’ western boundary. Later again, sometime after 1983, this and the southern boundary were returned to their original 1933 positions.
In the recession that followed the banking crisis of 2008, people were attracted to growing their own food and, by 2011, more than a thousand were on the waiting list for one of Plymouth’s 1,394 allotment plots. Plymouth City Council started to bring redundant plots back into use and, in 2014, plans were made to extend Swarthmore allotments into the lower field where allotments had been established in 1934. The first of the fifty reinstated plots was brought into cultivation in 2016 and others gradually followed.
Peverell Park allotments
Before the Second World War, suggestions that some of the land adjoining Venn Lane could be used for allotments had been firmly rejected by the Hoe and Parks Committee. That changed in November 1939 when the committee agreed to some of the land between the disused reservoirs and Venn Lane being allocated for the duration of the war. Eleven months later, a letter and petition from residents in the Peverell area led to these new allotments being extended to the present boundary fence and in January 1941, with the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign well underway, the Parks and Recreation Committee resolved that any available sites in Central Park could be used. There is some evidence that the lawns in front of Pounds House may have been included but, in any case, everything beyond the present fence line was restored as parkland by the early 1950s.
