Rewriting the Plot: Sustaining allotments in the UK and Japan

In the search for a model form of allotment garden in the late 1980s, capable of absorbing surplus farmland while sustaining the capacity of the land to support agriculture, Japanese experts rejected the UK allotment, which was perceived to be of low status and in decline, in favour of the German Kleingarten. This paper suggests that it may be time to reconsider the UK experience, in the light of subsequent moves to rewrite the image and practice of allotment gardening in the UK within the local sustainable development agenda, and the problems which the Japanese version of the Kleingarten model has encountered in the changed economic circumstances of the 1990s.