JC Niala, University of Oxford
This blog describes a public engagement project that won the SHS’s 2022 Public History Prize. You can read the announcement here.
I was already researching urban allotments in Oxford before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oxford did not have a city-wide waiting list before the pandemic started. Once it began, not only did allotment use increase, waiting lists quickly developed across the city.
In September 2020, I had written a blog post for the Social History Society exchange site about the way in which allotment sites became havens during periods of national crisis. As the pandemic wore on, I began to think about how allotments were used during both the First World War and the 1918/1919 influenza pandemic. When I came across an article that featured a poster from the Daily Mail in 1918, encouraging people to allotmenteer in order to stay healthy and protect themselves from the effects of the pandemic, I felt I had to respond.
My response was to recreate an allotment in the style of 1918 using open pollinated, non-hybrid, heritage seeds from the era. I documented the process and associated research with a series of blog posts as part of a publicly accessible online journal. During the summer of 2021, I hosted four public events at the allotment plot. Members of the public got to literally eat my research, but also to listen to First World War and garden inspired poetry and share reflections on past and present pandemics.
Even though it was not my initial intention, the allotment plot became a living memorial. One member of the public even travelled across the country with her son to the event which coincided with the anniversary of her father’s death. She saw the event as a way to remember her father who had been a child allotmenteer during the Second World War. Another member of the public had researched her family history after hearing a poem about the 1914 ‘Battle of Tanga’. She knew that a grandfather had lied about his age so he could fight in the Great War, but did not know where he had been deployed. She had been both shocked and moved to learn that there was an East African front and that more than 1 million African people had died because of the war. It turned out that the grandfather in question had fought in the ‘Battle of Tanga’.
When I first started the 1918 Allotment project, I was mainly focused on my own research. It enabled me to make links that I had previously not considered such as the link between tear gas on the Western Front and agricultural pesticides that have been widely used since the First World War. I was also able to trace the ways in which women’s histories (to the present day) on allotments have been hidden. All too often it is men’s names which are on the leases, such that even when women carry out most of the cultivating, they do not appear in the records. However, the public engagement aspect of the project is what brought it to life. Allotmenteers contributed their own site histories linking my 1918 plot to others that had existed through time across the country.
It felt like a positive contribution to be offering a space where people of different backgrounds and walks of life were able to gather and share their own personal histories. The ever-changing nature of an allotment plot through the seasons, also reflected the changing views that members of the public developed as they found out about aspects of history that they were not previously aware of. The 1918 Allotment also cemented the use of public engagement with research in my methodology. History is enriched through dialogic processes with the public. They are, after all, part of the communities that we research. A name on a page in an archival record is alive to a family member. Community contributions help to humanise our work and make it more accessible.
The culmination of the project is yet to come by way of a discussion event, exhibition and poetry reading at the Old Fire Station in Oxford on the 19th March 2022. I will be joined by other researchers including the esteemed allotment historian Jeremy Burchardt as we reflect on the history of growing and the sustenance it has provided for mind, body and spirit through time until the present day.
About the author:
JC Niala is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is a historian of the Great War. During the growing season of 2020/2021 she recreated an allotment in the style of the year 1918. The 1918 allotment was developed in partnership with Fig and was supported by ACE and The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.