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LRAALeicester Road Allotments Association
Digging up Memories
Digging Up Memories is a community project led by the Leicester Road Allotments Association, dedicated to capturing and preserving the stories, memories, and experiences of allotment holders across the county.
Allotments have long played a vital role in British life—from the wartime “Dig for Victory” campaign to today’s benefits for wellbeing, sustainability, and community. Through recorded interviews and personal contributions, this project is creating a living legacy that celebrates this rich history.
By sharing these stories, we hope to inspire future generations to discover the joy of growing their own food, building connections, and creating new memories that continue the tradition for years to come.
Do you have a story to tell?
Share Your Story
Your memories are priceless, and we’d love to help you preserve them. You could write them down, record yourself talking, or even let a friend or relative interview you. If you’re not comfortable on camera, that’s fine—we can use just the audio.
Don’t worry about pauses, mistakes, or silences—we’ll carefully edit everything so your story shines through.
Let us help you capture those moments before they’re lost.
Get in touch - dave@johnsonstudio.co.uk
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Steve Buzzard & Rod Marshall
Steve Buzzard: Dahlias
My father grew Dahlias as these were his favourite flowers; he would often say, “If they had a scent, they would be the National flower”. I also enjoy growing them and try to put a few on my Dad's grave on his birthday, 14th August.
A few tips I have learned since growing them –
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My dad used to lift the tubers every year after the 1st frost and store them over winter in the greenhouse. Because of our mild winters, tubers can be left in the ground with a thick mulch on top, which will protect them from harsh weather.
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I have found they don’t like being moved. 1st year of flowering produces poor results.
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Young shoots tend to attract slugs. I tried using crushed egg shells, but I find sharp sand is a better deterrent.
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This year, I had a problem with pigeons eating the new shoots. I put wire cages around the new growth, secured with a couple of canes, these cages do not need to be big. Just large enough to get the shoots established, 6/8 inches tall. Secure in place with a couple of canes.
Deborah Martin: Why is an allotment important to me?
I have come to allotment life and grow your own later in life and wished I had discovered it earlier. Sounds corny, but it feels like I have found something that just clicks and makes me happy. I can’t quite work out why it has taken me so long, though perhaps the excuse is a lack of time, a busy career and bringing up a family.
My allotment is a place where I feel at peace and happy. I also feel connected to the past and the future. My first memory of a vegetable garden is when I was about 7 or 8 and we were living in India. The house was set into the hillside and above us was a terraced vegetable garden that grew just about everything we needed. I would sneak up when no one was around and pick corn and peas to munch on. I would hide away out of sight and happily help myself.
My next memory is when I was a teenager and we lived next door to my grandparents. Grandpa had a small veg plot at the side of the house that was crammed full of potatoes, onions and beans.
His greenhouse was full of tomatoes and he had the most enormous compost bins and my strongest memory is of him finding a watch in the compost that he had lost a couple of years earlier!
Then when we moved up to Rutland my Mum decided Dad should grow veg and put his name down for a plot in Langham! The whole family got roped in and it seemed like hard work. When they moved to Uppingham Dad got two plots on the site I am now based on and for him allotment life almost became a full time job. My Mum complained she never saw him. We soon discovered that he had made many friends and spent most of the time talking to other plot holders!
Sadly Dad died while digging up his potatoes one August evening. Once the shock had eased we all agreed that it was what he would have wanted and also the way we wanted to remember him, outside doing something he loved.
I now have a plot on the same site Dad had his and soon understood why he loved it so much. There is so much satisfaction when you pick and eat something you have grown, even more when you share the bounty with friends and family. It is also somewhere to go away from the stresses of life and find peace. I can happily spend 2 hours on my own and feel a sense of contentment. I love our rickety shed that is slowly sinking on one side. It needs a good shove to straighten it up every now and again!
Equally, I enjoy chatting with other plot holders or hearing them quietly tending their plots at the same time. For me it provides just the right balance between community and solitude. One day a few years ago an elderly gentleman stopped to chat and then as the weeks went by and we got to know each other we discovered he had a plot next to Dad and knew him well. He would frequently stop to chat and we shared memories.
My youngest son has now discovered the joys of growing your own and has created a very productive space in what was a weed infested terraced garden on a steep slope. He asks for advice and I feel I am now passing the baton on.
My allotment connects me to my grandfather and father as it has brought many memories to the surface and now as my son has the bug it connects me to the future and a new generation learning the joy of growing your own. It is important to me for the peace I find when I am there, but above all else it is important for the memories it helps me hold onto and for the continuity between the generations it creates.
Gladys Blake, from Uppingham
Gladys Blake fondly recalls her father’s allotment in Market Harborough, memories that bring to mind both her parents, her service in the Land Army during the war, and the time she met her husband, Alan, who would later tend his own allotment at the Leicester Road site in Uppingham.
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Recorded 2025
Uppingham
Dave Johnson: why having an allotment is important to me.
It’s not as though I’m a particularly good gardener! Most of the time, my allotment is several weekends away from being anything you could remotely call tidy. But somehow, it connects me to my past—even though no one in my family ever had an allotment. Not in the traditional British sense, anyway.
My father always loved gardening. One of my lasting memories is of him at the bottom of the garden, puffing on his pipe and quietly tending his crops. He had come to England from Jamaica during the war, travelling by boat as one of the early members of the Windrush generation. He joined the RAF and spent his entire working life in the services. So, it’s not one particular garden I picture when I think of him—we moved around every three years or so—but wherever we were, my mum grew flowers near the house, and Dad grew vegetables.
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He wasn’t one to spend money. He saved seeds, even from tomatoes—perhaps a habit born of his humble beginnings. I was always amazed by how much he could grow in such a small patch of earth. He would have liked an allotment. The sense of camaraderie would have reminded him of life in the RAF. Sadly, glaucoma robbed him of that opportunity. Over time, he went completely blind.
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I always thought the love of growing things was in my blood. I never met my father’s parents, but there’s a black and white photograph of them in our family album. They’re standing in the hallway of what appears to be a grand house. My dad told me his father was a farmer, so as a boy, I imagined their land as a lush plantation—sugar cane, bananas, pineapples stretching across the Caribbean landscape.
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It wasn’t until I was older that I realised the photo was taken in a studio. That mansion was just a painted backdrop. But still, the image of the plantation persisted: the descendants of slaves, now masters of their own land, of their own destiny.
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That illusion changed in 2005, when we went to Jamaica for a family reunion. It was captured on the BBC programme Family Ties. There were about 200 of us from around the world, all related to my grandparents. My dad had passed away the year before, but my mum came with us. She was the heart of the documentary—it was her first time in Jamaica, too.
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During our stay, we visited the village where my father had been born. No plantation—just a scrubby patch of land, maybe the size of an allotment, clinging to the steep side of a mountain. At the bottom was a small house built of concrete blocks which had replaced the home where my dad and his eight siblings were raised. Suddenly, it made sense. Of course he saved seeds! Money was tight. They were only a couple of generations away from slavery.
I had my first allotment long before that trip to Jamaica—back in the 1970s, when we lived in Liverpool. I remember opening the door to our first house and finding a milk bottle on the hallway table, filled with sweet peas left by the neighbour across the street. He grew them on his allotment. Once we’d finished renovating the house, I was more than happy to follow him there.
Back then, old pine doors were easy to find. They were pulling down Victorian terraces to make way for substandard housing, and those doors ended up lining building sites to keep the scallies out. Before long, people started stripping and restoring them, but for us, they became sheds. Two doors upright at one end, two doors longwise on top of each other down the sides, an opening door at the front, and a roof made of—yes you’ve guessed it—more doors covered in felt or corrugated iron. A thing of beauty.
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My Mum, my wife, Sue and Dad (daughter, Elizabeth is in the pram)
We only had that plot a few years before we moved across the Mersey in search of a more genteel life (and more house renovations). What I remember most—besides my giant pumpkins—were the flourishing sugar snap peas. I don’t know what I was doing right, but I’ve never managed to grow crops like that again at my current allotment in Uppingham. The other thing I remember was that it was always several weekends away from anything you could remotely call tidy.
This is why having an allotment matters to me. Yes, there’s the unbeatable taste of freshly picked produce, and the quiet joy of being outdoors—surrounded by birdsong, under wide skies, watching a red kite wheel gracefully overhead. But more than all that, it’s the connection it gives me. To the land, to memory, to the hands that came before mine. What truly matters is the history it roots me to.
