Allotments

Click to see This Was Forever, a video about the Manor Garden allotments prior to the temporary removement from its long standing site in order to make way for the Olympics. It lasts ten minutes and is a great piece of work.	http://vimeo.com/2728392
There was a big campaign to retain the old Manor Garden allotments on the Olympic site that were 'relocated' to Marsh Lane. The story of the struggle is at www.lifeisland.org. The purpose of the original Marsh Lane proposal was to enable, and legitimise, the destruction of the fantastic and historic old site - which was carved away in the massive landforming operation to create designer parkland on the east bank of the Lea (which also involved the gassing of hundreds of resident rabbits and the infilling of the Channelsea River which the EIA statement had promised would be kept as a wildlife refuge, and loss of the community woodland on which millions had been spent a few years before). At the CPO enquiry it was claimed that a good temporary replacement site at Marsh Lane would be provided in advance and the plotholders would move back after the Olympics to a site at least as big as the old one in a similar location and of at least as good quality. First they were unable to provide the 'relocation' site prior to the planned closure date of the old site, after a succession of threatened final eviction dates. The plo holders went to Judicial Review so the ODA spent around £100,000 fighting before backing down just before the court date. The outcome was to allow some named plotholders restricted access to their plots for the following 3 months until Marsh Lane was supposed to be ready. About a quarter of the plotholders had given up completely by this point. The move to Marsh Lane fell far short of the seamless transition that had been promised, with lots of plotholder's possessions which were being 'securely' stored by the ODA on the Olympic site having disappeared or been damaged or left out in the rain. Shoddy construction work meant the site quickly turned into a bog A lot of people abandoned the plots at Marsh Lane in 2008 due to the problems resulting from incompetent construction . After 18 months it eventually got sorted out by Tim O'Hare Associates only after the intervention of LBC Radio and getting Andrew Gaskill of the LDA to reluctantly agree on air to bringing consultants in. Then the battle started to get the promises of the return to to old location to be honoured. This was like nailing jellyfish to the wall with no-one willing to commit to anything regarding the allotment provision post-Olympics despite all the promises. It then turned out that there was now not enough space in the 250 ha park to recreate the promised 2.1ha of Manor Garden allotments, and certainly nowhere near the old location. They decided it would have to be split into 2 small sites at opposite ends of the park, one on Eton Manor (owned by the LVRPA) squashed between Temple Mills Lane, a carpark, hockey pitch and motorway embankment and other the down near Stratford High St. This arrangement got planning permission two years ago. But allotments at Eton Manor don't fit the LVRPA's 'vision' of a landscaped sports complex and Waltham Forest don't want them there either. So what seems to have happened is that the LVRPA and WF have hatched a deal where WF make the Marsh Lane site permanent - probably the plan all along - and can then argue that the Eton Manor site is superfluous. LBWF's '2012 regeneration' officer Leon Welford has been trying to find out how many people would have wanted to move back to the Olympic park from Marsh Lane - presumably to help bolster the case for keeping the Marsh Lane site and reducing or eliminating provision in the Olympic park. Apparently the LVRPA have already planned a 'reconfiguration' of their Eton Manor area, minus the allotments. This seems to have been discussed at the May 24 LVRPA Executive Committee meeting as a 'not for publication' item - 'Eton Manor redesign - access and landscaping' (June 1, 2012)
See application to rat on promise to return the site.