Olivia Laing, Ken Worpole & Jon Day: The Allotment

The Allotment by Colin Ward and David Crouch is a 1988 classic of social and oral history, long out of print but finally reissued by the indefatigable Little Toller Books. As Olivia Laing writes in her introduction, it is ‘not just a history of guinea gardens, pigeon sheds and Dig for Victory, but of the social and historical conditions out of which the allotment arose and inside which it stubbornly persists.’

Laing, whose most recent book is Everybody (Picador), was be in conversation with writer and social historian Ken Worpole. The event was be chaired by Jon Day, who himself runs a community garden in London.