Lecture by Jeremy Dean

The allotment garden challenges and opportunities

Good Afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen. As you have already just heard or read in the conference programme, my name is Jeremy Dean. Although born in England, I have lived in Denmark for the past 35 years and have had connections to the Danish Allotment Garden movement for 27 of them. Some of you may remember that I participated in the International Congress in York some years ago and have happy memories of events at the National Railway Museum. My lecture today is a direct follow up from the seminar held in Birmingham last August.

The two main themes were:

• Who will be the future allotment gardener?
• How can allotment gardens meet the requirements of future generations? And
• How should the allotment garden sites be laid out?

From your efforts in the workshops, a resolution will be drawn up to help define the direction of policy making for allotment gardens in all our countries. I will suggest a method of how the workshops might come to results at the end of my speech. At this congress here in Copenhagen, you are once again faced with the daunting prospect of telling the absolute unequivocal truth about what the future might be like and what to do about it. At the seminar in Birmingham, Mogens Ginnerup Nielsen from Denmark drew up a list of developing trends in society generally and for the allotment gardener’s movement in particular.

Examples of these trends are:

• we’re getting wealthier all the time
• women are taking over in many areas
• there are more and more single parent families
• we have become more individualistic (some would say greedy)
• we’re overstressed despite more leisure time
• the population of Europe is becoming older
• Politics are no longer as left and right as they used to be - but are concerned with
• individuals rights to personal freedom contra collective responsibility and so on.