In 1981 David Jones pointed out that ‘[t]he subject of allotments deserves a major study’. This book, the first full-length account of the nineteenth-century allotment movement, aspires to fill that lacuna. As such it benefits from the advantages and pays the penalties that derive from working in a hitherto largely unexplored field. It is not, of course, the case that allotments have been entirely neglected, but much of what has been written is from an historiographical point of view unsatisfactory. Probably the best-known discussion of the subject is David Crouch and Colin Ward's The allotment: its landscape and culture (1988), this fine sociological text contains only two historical chapters, covering more than a century and a half. These are largely based upon the brief historical introduction to the Thorpe Report, a government departmental paper on allotments published in 1969. Turning to works by professional historians, the situation was, until very recently, little better. When research for this book commenced, the only extended discussion of the nineteenth-century allotment movement by a modern historian was an article by D. C. Barnett which appeared in a Festschrift for J. D. Chambers, edited by Eric Jones and Gordon Mingay, in 1967. But whilst Barnett's article is a pioneering (and widely-cited) study, it has several serious deficiencies. In the first place, it stops short in 1840, an unfortunate end-point since it obscures many of the most significant aspects of the allotment movement.