The Digger Movement In The Days Of The Commonwealth, As Revealed In The Writings Of Gerrard Winstanley

In an interview on Guerrilla Gardening

Before we talk about your book choices, can you tell me about guerrilla gardening?

Guerrilla gardening is technically known as illicit cultivation on someone else’s land. But for me, and everyone else involved, we’re very much looking at neglected public land, which we then transform into something more beautiful – through plants, flowers and vegetables. This is something which has taken off all over the world. Although it’s illegal the police have nearly always turned a blind eye to my activities and, as you can imagine, the public response is always very positive.

I’m intrigued by the first book on your list. Are these people the forefathers of guerrilla gardening?

Yes, I think in some ways they are. This is Lewis H Beren’s book about Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers. They were around in the wake of the Civil War in the 17th century. Charles I had just been executed and English society was being reinvented. There was a big debate going on about land ownership.

Winstanley worked out that a third of the country was common land. People had grazing rights but not cultivating rights and he didn’t think that made sense, given the rise of food prices and the abundance of space. So he decided to start gardening on the common land and growing veg with other local men. But, for him it went beyond just growing and harvesting food. He was after something more political. He wanted a currency-free state. In fact he was a communist before the word even existed. These days his legacy is most visible in Moscow where he is commemorated on an obelisk outside the Kremlin.

There’s also another book I’d like to mention which relates to that. Garden Cities of To-Morrow was written around the same time as Beren’s book. The author, Ebenezer Howard, is looking at Utopia and he has a very detailed plan of precisely how to get there. He writes about the ideal city having something like 30,000 people. He says all they need is common land which could sustain them both in their immediate area and near by. So he is thinking of a low density green city. He felt you could have the best of the city and of the countryside in that kind of arrangement. Sadly, he could never completely realise this with his projects such as Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City because there were always disputes about the ownership of the land.

Howard was writing almost 100 years ago and I think his ideas are still relevant to us today. It’s a reminder that we need to think about where our goods come from, and the amount of land we need to sustain a community and who owns that land.