Lowri Griffiths On The Quiet, Ungloriously Important Cultural Shift From Performative Urbanism To Pragmatic Allotment-Keeping Across Zones 2 And 3
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Here is the cultural story the London publishing industry is conspicuously failing to publish a book about: in the last four years, roughly half the people I know between the ages of 32 and 55 in North London have started serious gardening. Not window-box gardening. Not the occasional herb pot. Serious, back-garden, allotment-adjacent gardening, with compost systems and seed rotations and, in two alarming cases, rainwater collection barrels that have been installed with actual planning permission. This is a shift. No London publishing imprint has commissioned a book about it.
Why The Books Are Not Being Commissioned
The books are not being commissioned for several reasons. Gardening is, in London publishing terms, a specific genre with a specific existing readership that skews older and more rural; commissioning editors correctly assess that the readership for that genre is reasonably well-served. What is not being noticed is that a new readership has arrived: younger, urban, politically-adjacent, and arriving at gardening for reasons that do not map onto the existing gardening book market.
Why The Shift Happened
The shift happened, in my observation, for three reasons that everyone in my circle agrees on and nobody will state out loud. First, the pandemic. Second, a quiet realisation that the previous decade’s culture of performative urbanism had produced a very large number of people with very few practical skills, and that gardening is a practical skill that produces measurable output. Third, the food prices.
The Food Prices, Specifically
The food prices are the one we will not talk about, because talking about it is slightly embarrassing for a generation that made its cultural identity out of not caring about the cost of courgettes. I will talk about it. My allotment, which is 120 square metres on the Hampstead allotments site, produced, in the 2025 growing season, approximately 280 pounds of tomatoes, 140 pounds of courgettes, 85 pounds of runner beans, and approximately 60 pounds of mixed leafy greens. The retail replacement cost, at a Marylebone Waitrose, exceeds 900 pounds. The allotment rent is 92 pounds per year.
The Politics Of It
The politics of this shift are not, strictly, left or right. Gardening produces a specific kind of pragmatic libertarianism at the individual level – you own your own time, your own output, your own failure – combined with a specific kind of collective thinking at the community level – the allotment is, functionally, a commons. This combination does not map onto either of the two main parties’ preferred framings, which is part of why it goes unreported.
What Should Follow
A serious book about the London gardening shift would, in my estimate, sell. I have said so to two commissioning editors. Both were polite. Neither commissioned. This is, I suspect, because the editors themselves do not garden.
Further: The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
