Harvesting more than food: Assessing the provision, resource demand and ecosystem service delivery of British allotments

Interest in urban food cultivation has increased in recent years as attention has turned to its potential to provide sustainable and nutritious food for the increasing global urban population. Alongside this, a growing body of research has begun to address the potential environmental and social benefits that food cultivation in cities could entail. This thesis uses a case study system of allotment gardens in the United Kingdom to investigate, at a nationwide scale, a number of environmental and social features of urban horticulture. It begins with an investigation into land use change throughout the twentieth century, quantifying the loss of allotment land in the latter half of the 1900s, revealing that the most deprived urban areas have experienced eight times the level of allotment land loss as the least deprived, and uncovering that a large extent of former allotment land has the potential suitability for reconversion to use in urban horticulture. Following this, a nationwide field assessment of allotment soil quality is conducted, demonstrating that allotment soils maintain a significantly higher quality than commercial arable and horticultural soils, and producing the first estimate for the contribution of allotment soils to British carbon stocks. The third data chapter assesses the resource demands of allotment gardening with a year-long citizen science project, quantifying the yearly inputs required to cultivate and allotment and assessing where opportunities exist to increase resource use sustainability by better integrating allotments into urban energy flows. These diaries also form the dataset for the following chapter, which identifies the multiplicity of wellbeing benefits that allotment gardeners report to gain from their plots. The final data chapter uses detailed field mapping to reveal the variation in typical structures of allotment gardens, identifying within-plot land uses that contribute not only to food production but also the delivery of other environmental benefits. Finally, a discussion of future research priorities and possibilities are presented along with a summary of key policy messages from the results of the thesis research.