A campaign is underway to save Bath’s oldest allotment site where 64 plot-holders have been given notice to quit.
The Combe Down Allotments, which opened in 1894, were set up for Bath’s stone mine workers to feed their families.
It is the city’s last remaining privately-owned allotment site leased to Bath & North Somerset East Council. Campaigners from B&NES Allotments Association say it is the only such site which remains undesignated and unprotected as a Local Green Space under the council’s current Local Plan.
The site is owned by a distant relative of the original landowner, who does not live in Bath.
The current lease is due to expire this coming April and the landowner has informed the council of his intention to end the lease in 2025. As yet no specific date has been declared.
The independent association, which supports allotment tenants, is fighting to protect the site and says that if it is lost, there will be no realistic prospect of Combe Down residents ever having access to their own allotment within a sustainable distance of their homes.
The site has close ties with the Three Ways School to which it supplies surplus food through the Crop Drop charity.
There are 58 people on the waiting list for an allotment in the area and the only other site in Combe Down has just 10 plots. Other sites are much further away and have waiting lists of up to three years.
Allotment holders, some of whom have cultivated their plots for more than 50 years, face being evicted and will have to dig everything up, and knock down their sheds, greenhouses, fruit cages and polytunnels.
There is a petition on the change.org website – called Save Combe Down’s Allotments! – which urges the landowner to reconsider his decision and renew the council’s lease of the site for long-term allotment use.
Should he decline to do that, the council is urged to use all its powers and available resources to secure the long-term future of the site for allotments managed either by the council or a community group. They also want the council to use all its powers to protect the historic site from a change to another use.
The allotment association, which has written to councillors and local MP Wera Hobhouse to garner support, says that in this time of climate emergency, political support is needed for a local food growing strategy, backed up by stronger Local Plan policies to ensure developers provide adequate green infrastructure either on their sites or on identified and deliverable alternative sites.
The petition – https://www.change.org/p/save-combe-down-s-allotments – is due to close on 22nd January.
It will be collated with a paper petition for submission to the landowner and council at the beginning of February. There are currently more than 2,000 signatures.
