The Manor Gardens
Allotments, which used to be on a small island in the Lea Navigation, were concreted
over to make way for the London Olympics 2012. The gardeners were moved to new
allotments in Waltham Forest.
The conflict of
interest between the allotment holders and the Olympic Delivery Authority presented
a remarkable cultural clash. Intriguingly both sides in the conflict can trace
their origins back to the same Victorian tradition - the philosophy of muscular
Christianity. Those tracings present a fascinating picture of the social
scales, shapes and sizes of democratic, economic and political processes.
The Manor Gardens
Allotments are[1] the last
trace of the Eton Mission to the East End started
just after 1880. This mission was one of several undertaken by Oxford
and Cambridge University colleges and public schools.
These missions involved young men and sometimes women of wealthy and privileged
backgrounds going out the East End and
undertaking socially, morally and educationally improving works among the
impoverished working classes.
The Eton Mission began
just before 1883 in Hackney Wick with the building of a church and the
establishment of premises for various clubs: men’s clubs, boy’s clubs, Sunday
Schools, classes and social welfare programmes. It was funded by Eton College,
then the pinnacle of wealth and privilege in the British education system and
producer of endless Prime Ministers.[2]
Among the activities
organised were several sports activities. The reason for their inclusion was
based broadly in the Victorian philosophy of ‘muscular Christianity’ ideas
prominent at Rugby public school under Dr Thomas
Arnold.
Another person
influenced by these ideas was the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who, at
the same time as the Eton Mission started, was busy organising a revival of
classical Greece’s Olympic Games.
“Thomas Arnold,
the leader and classic model of English educators,” wrote de Coubertin “gave
the precise formula for the role of athletics in education.”[3]
In 1883 de Coubertin visited England
to see how this public school athleticism worked in education.
The Eton Mission
and particularly the sports clubs flourished. In 1924 four wealthy and
well-connected Old Etonians set up the Manor Charitable Trust to administer them.
They and their donors gave land for and funded an astonishing array of sports
facilities, including the allotments - tilling the land being a healthy Christian
activity - that became the Manor Garden Allotments.
After World War
Two the Trust’s interests became more educational. Trustees purchased land
outside of London,
and the Trust eventually evolved into the Villiers Park Educational Trust which
today helps ‘gifted and talented children’ from under-privileged backgrounds
get into university.
The boys’ clubs
closed in 1967 and, despite much recent somewhat nostalgic history about them,
little is immediately publicly available about the disposal of the Trust’s
assets. By 2000, however, the land on which the allotments stood was owned by
the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority.[4]
This land was compulsorily purchased by the Olympic Development Authority.
While the Eton
Manor clubs thrived and declined, de Coubertin’s Olympic Movement grew into the
global corporation which is today’s International Olympic Committee. Victorian
ideals thus inspired both the creation and the temporary destruction of the
Manor Gardens Allotments.
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Olympic Reading
Books
Brohm, Jean-Mari, Essays. Sport: A Prison of Measured Time. Translated by Ian Fraser. Ink
Links, London
NW5 2JS. 1978.
Hill, Christopher. Olympic
Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 1992.
Articles
MacAloon, John J. ‘Legacy’ as
Managerial/Magical Discourse in Contemporary Olympic Affairs, International
Journal of the History of Sport, 25: 14, (2008) pp 2060 — 2071).
Johansen, Michelle. Adventures
in the Wild East: The Early Years of the Eton
Manor Boys’ Clubs. This lecture was delivered at the ‘Up the Manor’ Project
Launch in September 2007. http://villierspark.org.uk/web_images//pdfs/michelles_lecture_the_early_years.pdf
Villiers Park Educational Trust, Our History, http://villierspark.org.uk
[1] The allotments are due
to return to the Olympic Park area when the Games have finished, so I continue
to use the present tense.
[2] Plus ca change…
[3] De Coubertin, Physical exercises in the modern world. Lecture given at the Sorbonne, November 1892.
(cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Coubertin
)
[4] Answer given by the
Lea Valley Regional Park Authority to a Freedom of Information Act question
from Julian Cheyne of the Clay’s Lane Residents Association.
