29 October 2026
The Waiting List Is Enclosure, Still Running
Britain's decade-long allotment waiting lists aren't really about scarce land — they're the last visible edge of the Enclosure Acts. Here's the land-in-trust vision Rooted Common Ground Farms is building instead.
In parts of the country, the waiting list for an allotment plot runs past a decade. Ten years, for a strip of ground the size of a parking space, to grow your own vegetables. People die waiting. People move house and lose their place in the queue and start again somewhere else. It's treated as a quirky bit of British bureaucracy, the kind of thing you joke about at a dinner party — "I've been on the list since my daughter was born, and she's at secondary school now." It shouldn't be a joke. It's the clearest sign we have that something basic got broken a long time ago, and nobody's fixed it since.
Here's the thing people don't say out loud: that waiting list isn't really about plots being scarce. Britain isn't short of land. It's short of land anyone's allowed to grow on. There's a difference, and the difference has a name, and the name is enclosure.
Between the 1600s and the 1800s, a few thousand Acts of Parliament took land that had belonged to everyone — common land, grazing rights, the strips and gleaning rights ordinary people had worked for generations — and handed it to individual landowners, fenced and surveyed and deeded. It was legal. It was done slowly, parish by parish, so it never looked like one single theft. And it worked exactly as intended: within a couple of generations, most people in England went from having some working relationship with land to having none at all. You could walk past thousands of acres on your way to a twelve-hour shift and not one blade of grass on it would be yours to touch.
We don't live under that same law anymore. But we live with what it built. The ten-year waiting list is downstream of it. So is the fact that "garden" has become a thing only some households get to have, tied to what you can afford for a house with outdoor space. So is the slightly odd feeling a lot of people report the first time they're handed a trowel and told to just have a go — a kind of nervous unfamiliarity with dirt, like it belongs to somebody else and they're not sure they're allowed. That feeling isn't natural. Nobody's born distrusting soil. It's learned, generation over generation, by a few hundred years of being fenced out.
This is the pattern Rooted Common Ground Farms exists to interrupt, even in its early, still-forming stage. The vision is a network of community farm spaces across central England — land held in trust, not owned by any one person and not available to be sold off when someone decides it would be worth more as something else. Held in trust means held for a reason: so the next generation, and the one after that, inherits a place to put their hands in the ground rather than inheriting another waiting list. That's the whole point of trust as a legal structure here — permanence that an individual owner, however well-meaning, can't promise.
But we'd be lying if we dressed this up as a transaction — "here's your plot, in exchange for your decade on a list." That's still enclosure logic, just with better manners. The actual aim is a relationship, not an allocation. You don't have to own a square foot of it to belong to it. You don't have to prove you'll use it productively, or justify your right to be there, or perform any version of having it together before anyone will hand you a fork and point you at a bed that needs weeding. A garden has never once asked anybody what's wrong with them before it let them dig. We're trying to build spaces that work the same way — because for a lot of people, especially people carrying stress or grief or a nervous system that's been on high alert for too long, the first ten minutes with your hands in soil can do something that ten years of thinking about your problems never quite managed.
None of this is finished, or funded, or sitting on a title deed yet. Rooted Networks Ltd is working towards becoming a Community Interest Company, which is a way of saying: we're building this to be accountable to the people it's for, not to shareholders, and we're doing it in the open, a step at a time, rather than promising more than currently exists. What we can say honestly is this — the waiting list was never really about plots. It was about who gets to have a relationship with land at all. We think that should be everyone. Not eventually, once you've proved something. Now, as you are.