Chris Hoare’s Growing Spaces records the cultivation of urban land in Bristol at a moment when questions of food, access to nature, and collective use of the city became newly urgent. Working from April 2020, Hoare photographed allotment-goers, landscapes, and seasonal change across eleven official and unofficial sites, from established allotments and community gardens to improvised plots on disused land. The book was published by RRB Photobooks in 2021 alongside an exhibition at the inaugural Bristol Photo Festival.

The project’s strength lies in its patient breadth. Rather than reducing urban growing to either pastoral escape or social policy, Hoare attends to the varied forms it takes and to the people reshaping it: economically and environmentally conscious young people, families, and ethnic-minority communities, as well as the more familiar allotment constituency. The photographs follow cultivation as a lived practice, visible in the arrangement of plots, the passage of seasons, and the distinct choices of produce and farming method.

That contemporary account is set against a longer history. Bristol’s allotments belong to a system that emerged in the nineteenth century to provide food-growing land for working people during industrialisation, was transformed by the Second World War’s “Dig for Victory” campaign, and later acquired a narrower image as a pastime for retirees. Hoare’s documentation registers the changing social meaning of these spaces without treating them as static heritage.

For collectors, Growing Spaces merits attention as a focused record of a city’s changing relationship with land, made at a precise historical juncture and grounded in sustained observation rather than spectacle. Its subject is local, but its concerns—community, ecology, food production, and the contested value of urban space—travel well beyond Bristol. The English-language volume comprises 80 pages.