Girl, 4, killed in blast at house after residents ‘smelled gas’
Once the preserve of old men in flat caps, allotments are now the hottest property on the market. And it’s not all down to the credit crunch ......
A GIRL thought to be aged just four was killed yesterday and three other people were seriously hurt after a suspected gas explosion destroyed a family home.
The child’s body was pulled from the rubble after a desperate search lasting hours.
Three other people were taken to hospital in critical condition and a fourth person was treated at the scene.
The 7am blast tore apart one house and left nearby homes badly damaged. Neighbours in Thornton Heath, south London, told of family members being trapped inside the wrecked house. They said the area had been ‘smelling of gas all week’ and they had repeatedly asked for engineers to fix it.
Resident Delroy Simms, 62, said he and another neighbour tried to rescue the trapped family. Giving a dramatic account while still wearing his pyjamas, Mr Simms said: ‘I was getting ready to go to work when I heard the explosion.
‘I already knew what it was because gas was smelling all week – really strong. My neighbour has been calling them [engineers] all week. When I heard the explosion it was like an earthquake. The shutters on our windows blew off their hinges. I went to the window and saw the devastation.’
Mr Simms said he rushed to the house with neighbour Kutoya Kukanda, 50, who passed a child out as bricks were still falling from the home. Mr Kukanda said: ‘I heard “boom”, then I opened the door. I saw smoke – the house had collapsed, and people were screaming inside. I went inside and took the first baby – there were three children. I took one of the children. The mother was screaming and saying, “One of my daughters is still inside!”’
Neighbour Awais Zahir, 26, said: ‘I went to the house and saw the mum come out. She was bleeding from both her hands and trying to look for her kids. She found all but one of her kids. She was shaking and screaming “I can’t find my child!”’
Another resident described the girl who died as ‘lovely’. She said workmen had come to her house in recent days to look for the gas leak. She added: ‘They could have turned off the gas. Our windows are gone, the roof is destroyed.’
Fire officials said three people were rescued shortly after the blast. Local council leader Ross Garrod said the cause was a gas explosion, but fire chiefs had not confirmed this last night.
‘It was like an earthquake’
DURING wartime, it was all about Digging for Victory. By the 1970s, it was more about wielding a spade for sustainability, quitting the rat race for a simpler existence. Back then, of course, the quest for the Good Life was seen, certainly by most viewers who tuned in to the popular BBC1 sitcom, as more a source of wry amusement than a serious lifestyle choice.
It would surely have taken more than a few schooners of home-brewed peapod burgundy to persuade aspirational suburbanites to follow Tom and Barbara Good’s mini-agrarian revolution by ripping out their own neatly clipped lawns and carefully tended roses in the name of self-sufficiency.
Almost 50 years on, however, how quickly recent events have changed attitudes. As the nation staggered out of the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s terrifying invasion of Ukraine at the end of February shook people out of their food complacency and food prices hit record highs the following month. The disastrous impact of that conflict was confirmed by analysis last month by Which?, the consumer organisation, which looked at 21,000 grocery items and found that many had risen in cost by more than 20 per cent.
Now, amid the kind of perfect storm of soaring food and fuel prices, rising inflation, and nationwide strikes rarely seen since the Goods were primetime fare, there is a renewed hunger to dig ourselves out of this cost of living crisis.
Months of lockdown saw houses with gardens highly prized by househunters, while allotments whose popularity had withered for a time in the face of superstore convenience were suddenly as rare as hen’s teeth. Yet with growing space at a premium – especially in cities, where waiting lists for allotments can stretch into years – and a new green-fingered cohort desperate to find somewhere to grow their own and cut the family shop, are we really seeing people heading back in time to embrace the ‘New Good Life’?
Down at his allotment in Inverness, Richard Crawford has watched demand for plots shoot up. ‘We actually had quite an extensive waiting list building up to the coronavirus pandemic,’ he said, ‘but when Covid hit, it just rocketed as lockdown made people realise that allotments help provide mental and physical wellbeing.
‘But now the cost of food in supermarkets is sky high, we are seeing even more interest. We now have over 90 on the waiting list but we only turn over five or six places a year, so it is basically a 15-year waiting time and I am getting a steady drip of two or three more a month wanting to join, which is crazy.’
A recent survey showed this is far from an isolated situation with Scottish cities, where land is in scarce supply, suffering the longest waiting lists. Edinburgh has around 2,600 people waiting for a plot, while Glasgow has 1,829.
Mr Crawford, who is also vice president of the Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society (SAGS), said: ‘This situation is being replicated across Scotland. There are a lot of other sites that have a similar experience where it’s going to be a ten or 15-year wait.’
He and others fought for years to secure public land to establish the Hawthorn Allotments in Inverness in 2011. ‘They gave us a plot of land at the end of a huge playing field in the Dalneigh area of Inverness, which gave us 58 plots at first.’
When he talks about the benefits of having his own patch of land, the reason he fought so hard becomes obvious. ‘If you have a decent-sized plot, you can certainly grow enough to take you through most of the year and a polytunnel, which I’ve got, extends the season by at least one month either side of the growing season. It just means you have to eat seasonally, rather than the same things year round.
‘But that’s good because you can get fed up with the same diet all year round.
‘I take a bit of pride from the fact that I am harvesting something all year round. Things like potatoes you can leave in the ground provided they are covered. Carrots, leeks, onions and shallots and things like that you take out and store, so those kind of things, they can last really all year and if you’ve got a freezer and you grow plenty of things, you can freeze all of it.’
Mr Crawford added: ‘I grow to be self-sufficient and avoid supermarkets and certainly for the bulk of the year, we don’t have to buy any extra.
‘There are a number of reasons for that: one is the cost of it, two, is the taste, then more people are becoming more aware of things like their carbon footprint and plastic usage and that kind of stuff.’
Grow your own is, he argues, undoubtedly the healthier and tastier option, but is it the cheaper option? ‘If you swapped your time for money then no,’ he said.
‘However, if you accept that this is your hobby as well and that it’s helping your health and wellbeing, you can negate the time you put in by the huge benefits that you reap from it personally.’ He said: ‘Funnily enough, my partner and I sat down last year and asked ourselves, “How much do we save – is it worthwhile?”
‘And we worked out that we probably saved in the region of £400 to £500 off our food bill, obviously not taking into account my time. That is a lot of money; we managed nearly 80lb of potatoes, plus beetroot and other veg coming out and overall it outweighs what you would pay in the supermarket.’
Now 59, his love of gardening was learned as a child at his grandfather’s knee. ‘He had a big garden and I’ve got pictures of me as a two-year-old pushing a wheelbarrow around giving him a hand. Whenever I used to stay with him, I used to work his garden with him.’
His interest was reignited after leaving the Navy: ‘One of the first things I did was to go and get an allotment. I’m firmly of the belief that it’s because my grandfather encouraged me at a young age to just enjoy doing it and enjoy the fruits of the harvest.
‘And I’m now working with the local schools to get the kids to feel the same thing in their blood. And even if it only gets five or six kids interested who wouldn’t have otherwise done it, that makes it worthwhile.’
He admits, with a laugh, that he still works part-time as a supermarket delivery driver. ‘When I’m delivering all these veggies, though, I keep saying to the customer that they could
‘Huge benefits you reap from it personally’ ‘Anyone can do this but I think many are scared’
grow those themselves!’ The desire to be self-sustaining drove Laurah Hunter to quit her job as a train guard on the Caledonian Sleeper to spend more time on her allotment near her home in Fife. ‘I only had to wait six months to get my allotment and I love it. It was utterly bare and overrun with grass and weeds, but I just saw a project,’ she said.
‘I have leeks in the freezer and soft fruits and berries. I keep all the staples, onions and potatoes and carrots, in the dark in the garage, and we are finding that we’re buying significantly less,’ said the 38-yearold, who works as a caretaker and also curates her own community on social media, sharing her progress as well as tips and encouragement with other gardeners.
She supplements the allotment by foraging, for nuts and nettles, dandelions and elderflowers, wild rocket and camomile. ‘Anyone can do this but I think many are scared, but I believe we are starting to move away from the idea that all our food has to come from shops and opening ourselves up to what grows around us,’ she added.
Allotments have enjoyed a mixed history. At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Britain’s reliance on food imports was running at an unsustainable 70 per cent. As domestic production was ramped up, no land went to waste. Public parks became allotments and even the Royal Family grew onions in place of bushes and shrubs in their palace gardens.
On farms, Land Girls were drafted in to help farmers – more than 80,000 of them by 1944. By the end of the war, foreign imports had been halved and there were nearly 1.4million allotments in Britain, producing 1.3million tons of food as part of the war effort.
By the late 60s, interest was waning as the convenience of supermarket shopping came to the fore. Two decades later, a focus on healthy living gradually brought people back to the vegetable patch.
When Covid hit, the health benefits of gardening suddenly became a massive boon. ‘Allotment holders could legitimately go down and use their allotments, chilling out and doing their gardening, while everybody else was locked down,’ said Mr Crawford.
‘It was good for both physical and mental health.’
He firmly believes more people should be afforded the chance to garden and a Holyrood inquiry is looking at the demand for allotments
across the country and whether the application process is working adequately. The process will scrutinise the Community Empowerment Act 2015, which states no applicant should be on the list for more than five years.
He said: ‘SAGS is working closely with the Scottish Government to get the Act more widely adopted by councils across Scotland. We need strong action.’
The cost of living crisis has only added to the urgency. As garden centres report sales of seeds are up four-fold compared with last year, it seems many are turning what little green space they have over to food production.
In the absence of allotments, residents of tenements in Edinburgh and Glasgow have had to get creative by transforming their tiny front gardens, back closes and even windowsills into micro-plots, helped by groups like Propagate, an urban growers collective in Glasgow. ‘It’s amazing what you can grow in a small space, especially if you use permaculture methods such as polycultures [where you grow multiple crops in the same space] rather than growing in traditional rows,’ explained founder and director Abi Mordin in a recent interview. Although such micro-gardens cannot provide enough space for people to be self-sufficient – it is estimated about an acre is needed – the hope is to give people a better idea of what is possible to grow.
For those with the space, experts recommend doing some planning first and focus on growing pricier items to maximise the return from their garden patch. ‘Prioritise growing the most expensive,’ said Leigh Hunt, from the Royal Horticultural Society. ‘Carrots are cheap and easy to grow but you’ll save more by growing crops like salad.’
Home-grown tomatoes, for example, can cost as little as 5p a pound, compared with more than £1 a pound in supermarkets. Aubergines and lettuces can be about 20p each compared with about £1 or more in stores.
Karen Birch, chief officer with Abundant Borders – one of an explosion of community groups trying to tempt more people into growing their own – has seen a marked increase in people signing up to its classes. ‘Everybody who comes to the gardens and the cooking courses, whether to learn basic or advanced cooking skills or just how to cook on a budget, they are all reporting that it is much more difficult to afford to feed themselves,’ she said. The group, which runs six community gardens
‘Healthy meals from the food that they grow’
in the Borders, has a simple plan. ‘We try to create a virtuous cycle; we teach people how to grow food in a sustainable way and we teach people how to create healthy and nutritious meals from the food that they could grow or which can be sourced locally.’
Mrs Birch follows a similar ethos in her own modest cottage garden. ‘It is not huge but we grow many kilograms of food each year. We grow a large amount of soft fruit, vegetables, peas, beans, apples, pears, which shows you can grow an awful lot in a small space with the right skills.’ It could almost have been Barbara Good herself talking. But, perhaps, it is time for a repeat of the Good Life.