Join us at Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses to celebrate the release of This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing, a collection of 12 vibrant pieces celebrating of allotment life, from gardeners, food writers, novelists, horticulturalists, and historians. Editor and publisher Sarah Rigby will be in conversation with gardener, writer and print maker Sui Searle.
An allotment. ‘A ‘10 pole’ space for the growing of fruit and vegetables. A health-giving, heart-filling miniature kingdom of carrots, courgettes and callaloo. A microcosm for our societies at large as people claim their ‘patch’ and guard it fiercely, but also of welcoming arms, gifted gluts and new recipes from across the seas.
They are places of resilience, resistance and freedom. They are blowsy dahlias, cricket on the radio, buzzing bees and the wisdom of weeds and seeds. This Allotment brings together thirteen brilliant writers in a glorious celebration of these entirely unique spaces: plots that mean so much more than the soil upon which they sit.
Sarah Rigby is an editor, publisher and book coach, and publishing director at the vibrant independent Elliott & Thompson. She has published some of the country’s best-loved and award-winning writers of nature and place, including Nancy Campbell, Rob Cowen and James Aldred. Originally from Yorkshire, she lives in London with her family, where she shares an allotment with her friend Viv and volunteers for Organic Lea, a workers’ co-operative and community food-growing project on the edge of Epping Forest.
Sui Searle is a gardener, writer and printmaker. She retrained in horticulture as a career change and has worked in botanic, public, private and community gardens as well as spending a short period writing for gardening magazines. She is the founder of @decolonisethegarden, which focuses on bringing a decolonial lens to horticulture, and is editor of the alternative online gardening newsletter, Radicle. Both aim to seek, in community, possibilities of an otherwise. She sees the garden as a site of everchanging co-creation with the potential to practise other modes of being – a place to practise being in kinship and cultivating deeper relationships with our more-than-human kin.
Tickets are Pay What You Can from £7.