Family vows great-granddaughter will one day grow courgette on sacred municipal soil
A London family has inherited position 1,846 on an allotment waiting list after the previous holder died peacefully at 103, having joined when Harold Wilson was still considered current affairs.
A wait measured in prime ministers
The position has now passed to his grandson, who has been advised that progress is "encouraging." He is 71. Council officers estimate a plot could become available sometime between 2047 and the geological rearrangement of southern England.
Real waiting lists are already formidable enough without embellishment. Camden Council found in 2022 that the average wait for a plot in the borough was twelve years, and a 2023 Greenpeace freedom-of-information request found that more than 30,500 Londoners are currently on allotment waiting lists, with some boroughs closed to new applicants entirely.
The family's original applicant, Ernest Pickering, joined the St Mildred's Municipal Vegetable Opportunity Register in 1968 because he wanted somewhere to grow onions. He bought seeds. The seeds died. He bought more seeds. Britain decimalised. He married. The council reorganised. Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street. The Berlin Wall fell. Tony Blair arrived. Facebook was invented. Ernest remained number 2,114.
"He never lost hope," said his daughter. "He did lose the onions." In 1997 he reached 2,000 and opened champagne. In 2012 he reached 1,900 and booked a soil-testing kit. By 2024 the council advised him to begin considering what vegetables he might eventually enjoy. Ernest died before choosing. His funeral order of service, at his own request, included a single line beneath his name: "He was patient about the onions." Mourners were invited to bring a single seed packet each, which the family later planted in a window box, since none of them held any land to put it in.
The heirloom nobody can eat yet
His grandson Peter has inherited the dream. The council initially rejected the succession because allotment waiting-list positions are technically non-transferable. Peter appealed. After four committees, sixteen forms and a hearing conducted in a room called The Sustainable Neighbourhood Engagement Suite, officials accepted that the position had acquired "significant familial character." Solicitors now list it beside jewellery and property: To my grandson Peter I leave my watch, my war medals and my provisional expectation of approximately 125 square metres of municipal earth.
London estate agents have taken notice. Waiting-list positions are now being informally valued. Number 812 recently attracted an offer of £9,000. Number 214 includes "excellent south-facing potential." A position inside the top 50 is described as "virtually land." Genuine allotment holders, meanwhile, are advised to go through official channels - the National Allotment Society remains the actual representative body for UK plot-holders, and no amount of secondary-market pricing changes what it can and can't do for members.
Peter now visits the allotment fence every Sunday. He stares through at rows of potatoes cultivated by people who joined the list before broadband. "It gives me hope," he said. His granddaughter accompanies him. She is nine. Peter has already added her as an emergency contact. "If I don't make it," he told her, "promise me one thing." She nodded solemnly. "Grow a courgette." "What if I don't like courgettes?" Peter stared into the middle distance. "None of us knows."
Council officers insist the system, while slow, remains entirely fair. "Everyone waits the same amount of time," explained one, "provided everyone applied on exactly the same day in 1968, which admittedly narrows the pool." Asked whether the council had considered simply creating more allotments to shorten the list, the officer paused for a long moment, thanked the reporter for their patience, and asked if there were any other questions.
The council has offered Peter one small concession: a laminated certificate confirming his family's "historic and ongoing commitment to the waiting list," suitable for framing. Peter has hung it in the hallway, next to his grandfather's war medals and directly above a small, empty pot where he keeps meaning to plant something, just in case the call ever comes.
Council officers have privately conceded that the certificate cost more to produce than the average allotment plot generates in a decade of rent, though they maintain it was money well spent, "for morale."
Peter's wife, who married into the waiting list rather than choosing it, says she has come to accept it as a permanent fixture of family life, somewhere between a hobby and a haunting. "Other families have a boat they never use, or a timeshare nobody wants," she said. "We have a number. It just keeps getting smaller, very slowly, forever."
Local historians have begun taking an interest in the case, describing the Pickering position as "a rare and complete four-generation waiting-list record," the kind of continuous documentation that would normally require a family Bible rather than a laminated council letter. There is talk, not entirely serious, of nominating the position itself for some form of civic recognition, on the basis that it has now outlasted several of the actual allotment plots it was originally meant to lead to, two of which were sold for redevelopment in the 1990s and are now a branch of a mid-range gym.
Peter says he tries not to think about that particular detail too often.
The family has been waiting on the allotment waiting list so long nobody remembers what the allotment was originally for. https://prat.uk/?p=48504
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