UK: ‘I built my home next door to the allotment’: the growers who go to extremes to feed their passion

Years-long waiting lists for a patch of land force the committed to adapt their lives

By Emma Magnus
Telegram
23 December 2025

John Soulsby discovered the joys of growing your own at just eight years old, when he cultivated his first dahlias. At 18, he joined the local leek club – a competitive group for growing large leeks – and secured his first allotment plot through a friend, content to commute 13 miles to it, in Kibblesworth, near Newcastle.

Like his flowers and vegetables, Soulsby’s passion grew, and he acquired another plot nearby, before buying a whole garden roughly the size of 10 standard plots.

His hobby slowly became a business: he ran a plant nursery, flower shops, a wholesale flower business and a garden centre. In 2007, he even grew what was then the world’s heaviest leek, weighing as much as a small dog at 18lb 5oz.

Soulsby moved house twice to be closer to his garden: first to a property three miles away, and then to a property in Kibblesworth itself – where Frances, now his wife, also lived.

In 1993, he decided to purchase the derelict community hall next to his plot and go one step further: build a house as close to his gardens as possible.

It took around six months of hard graft to build the handsome Georgian-style property, which he named The Garden House.

Once it was finished, Soulsby still had bricks left over, so he built a second, three-bedroom property, a 60ft greenhouse, garage, workshop and walled garden. But drew the line there, so as not to infringe further on his growing space.

“I could have earned a lot more money [by building more], but it’s not always about money, it’s about happiness,” he says. “I love the garden too much.”

Soulsby and Frances still live at The Garden House 34 years later, and his daughter and her family live next door. At 74, Soulsby spends 10 hours a day in his garden, from daybreak to dusk.

Though he no longer competes, he runs vegetable shows, is chairman of the North East Horticultural Society, and shares gardening advice on his website and social media channels (you can find him @gardeningwithjohnsoulsby on TikTok).

Over his 60 years of growing, Soulsby has seen interest blossom. Not only are his fellow growers more diverse, he says, but their crops are too. The issue is, there just aren’t enough places to do it. “There’s always been a queue to get on to allotments,” he says. “There’s not enough of them to supply the need.”

‘I’d rather travel an hour to my allotment than face another waiting list’
Long allotment waiting lists are something Rory Morrison is all too familiar with.

When he first applied for an allotment near his flatshare in Muswell Hill, he was told he could be waiting for up to nine years. “It didn’t put me off massively, but I don’t know why – I was renting, and I didn’t know if I’d be around,” he says. “I thought it was worth holding out.”

Such wait times for allotments are not uncommon. According to research from Greenpeace, more than 170,000 people in England were on council allotment waiting lists in 2023, which have doubled in length since 2011.

While the average waiting time is three years, there is still a postcode lottery: in Islington, residents face waits of 15 years, and some councils’ lists are closed altogether.

Sites are also closing, with 42 given permission to be sold between 2020 and 2024 – prompting Jeremy Corbyn to accuse Angela Rayner, the then housing secretary, of hammering a “nail in the coffin” of community allotments earlier this year.

Morrison obtained his plot after three years, but in 2017, three years later, he and his partner moved to Camberwell, stretching what had once been a five-minute walk to his plot into a 20-mile round trip. “I couldn’t really face going on another eight-year waiting list – and a lot of them were closed anyway,” he says.

“It changes the way I use the allotment – I tend to go for the entire day now – and it changes what you grow, being at a distance.”

Morrison, 52, a graphic designer, makes the one-hour journey by bike to his plot up to twice a week. Without a car, he has invested in panniers and a trailer to haul his artichokes, tomatoes, berries and courgettes across London.

“People think I’m a bit mad, but other people travel long distances for their hobbies,” he says. “I enjoy the physical exercise and being out in nature. I just get a calm feeling when I go there, and it is really rewarding when you’ve cultivated something.”

An increasing number of people want to experience this for themselves. “The waiting list statistics in the UK are the tip of the iceberg compared to the appetite for growing in the UK,” says Ed Morrison, Rory’s nephew and one of the founders of private allotment provider Roots Allotments.

“We think it’s probably more like three to four million people who want to get into it but don’t really know how, because the space to grow is so inaccessible.”

Ed founded Roots in 2021, partly in response to his own struggles securing an allotment. After learning to grow during lockdown, the 32-year-old discovered that the wait for a plot in Lambeth, where he lived then, was 28 years long. “I’d have to wait my whole life again before I would sow a seed. That really threw me.”

The solution, he says, was to club together with co-founders William Gay and Christian Samuel to lease a nine-acre field from Gay’s farmer parents and turn it into Roots’ first plots. Now, the organisation rents more than 150 acres of allotment space nationwide, with 21 “growing communities” and 4,000 members. It also offers tools, seeds and resources as part of its subscription model.

Ed is passionate about the benefits of allotments: they are part of the solution to food security, the climate crisis, the loneliness epidemic. Allotments, he says, have helped him combat depression, have eased members through grief and brought people together.

“I think that bringing people back to the land and back together in real life is the most important thing we could do as a species and society right now,” he says. “Allotments are lifelines, and we need more access to them.”

‘It feels like such a privilege to have an allotment’
Faced with long waits, some wannabe growers have been forced to get creative.

Caroline Minns, 55, who works in PR, bought her house in Tulse Hill, south London, for its views over the neighbouring allotments. She decided to ask around when she found out that the waiting list for them was closed.

She put up a postcard – decorated with hand-drawn carrots – at the allotment community centre, asking if anyone wanted to share their plot. Six months later, someone got in touch, and let her cultivate a bed in their plot for around two years.

When Minns finally made it on the council’s list for her own plot (it only opened for a week before filling up again), she was told that it could take at least 10 years. In the end, she was contacted after just a year, but with two young children and full-time work, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to commit to the upkeep, and considered turning it down.

“Although it was massively overgrown, it was brilliant. We looked at it and said, ‘We’re going to make it work.’ Somehow, we have.”

Minns’s family’s prime crop is tomatoes, with 30 plants this year. The allotments have an annual barbecue, an apple press for people to make their own cider, and a WhatsApp group for sharing tools and produce. But as well as being part of a community, the allotments are a place for solitude, says Minns – where her two daughters can “feel a bit of nature under their fingernails”.

“It’s definitely a reason why we stay [here],” she says. “We always tell each other how lucky we are to have it – it feels like such a privilege.”

Similarly, Joanna Bowmaker, a business development manager, had been on a waiting list for an allotment near her home in Sunderland for seven years (she was told it would take five), and was disappointed that some plots didn’t look as though they were being used.

Without space to grow things at home, Bowmaker, 34, had nudged the council, contacted allotment organisers, and even asked her husband’s grandmother if her friends needed help with their plots, offering to cover their fees. No luck.

She remained eager and, after seeing an advert online for Roots, she applied for a plot. The cost was higher (£19.99 per month, compared to £20-£30 per year for a small council plot in her area) but, to her delight, she got one straight away.

Since August, she has grown radishes, broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce on her thrice-weekly visits.

“The best part is that my children are getting interested and involved in the whole project. We spend the evenings looking through gardening books together,” she says. “Whether it’s half an hour after work to water the plants or half a day on Saturday, we’re just happy to spend time there.”

Link.

Source: https://cityfarmer.info/uk-i-built-my-home-next-door-to-the-allotment-the-growers-who-go-to-extremes-to-feed-their-passion/