Manor Garden Allotments

The gardens were established in 1924 by Major Arthur Villiers, director of Barings Bank and philanthropist, to provide small parcels of land for local people in that deprived area to grow vegetables.

The promontory location of the site on top of a Victorian refuse pile, clay-capped and dressed with topsoil by Villiers, lent a sense of refuge and escape for the generations of gardeners that worked the land.

The character of the place was semi-rural, enhanced by Villers planting plum trees down the banks of the tidal Lea, and its occupants allowing wild hedgerow to flourish alongside the vegetable gardens.

[1] During the summer of 2007 the site remained as allotments, despite the 'blue fence' (the secure boundary to the emerging Olympic Park development) being erected and denying general public access to the area.

A promise of 2.1 hectares provision, and an offer of an equivalent replacement plot to all tenants evicted from the Eastway Allotment Site was recorded in the ODA planning permissions.

It had long been understood that Lee Valley Regional Parks, the landowners at Eton Manor and thus future landlords of the proposed allotments had been resistant to the inclusion of the amenity.

It is then evident that there would be no allotment provision in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park within the approved timeframe with delivery of the Pudding Mill Lane site further delayed until November 2015.