Andrew Buurman’s Allotments takes as its subject a single site: Uplands Allotments in Handsworth, Birmingham, which the publisher describes as the largest allotment site in the United Kingdom, with 422 plots, opened in 1949 and still possessing its own office and meeting hall. Buurman photographed there rather than surveying allotments at large, and the concentration gives the book its character. What might have been a general survey of a familiar British institution becomes instead a study of one working community, its particular ground, its sheds and greenhouses, and the individuals who tend them.
The allotment carries a heavy freight of association in British culture — traditional values, honest toil, a rural idyll imagined from the city. The publisher’s own framing notes how thoroughly the institution tracks wider social change, from open-field agriculture through industrial urbanisation to the wartime drive for home-grown produce and the later decline and renewed interest in plots. Buurman’s photographs, made in colour, address the present rather than the nostalgia. They record the enthusiasm and diversity of contemporary plot holders, and the communal life that persists at Uplands in weekly tea dances, bingo nights and an annual flower and vegetable show — evidence that this is a social world as much as a horticultural one.
Buurman came to photography after teaching in Japan and studying photojournalism at the London College of Printing, and worked as a photographer for The Independent. That background suggests a documentary discipline: attention to ordinary circumstance, to people at work and at leisure, without theatricality. The book’s design is restrained and considered — a clothbound hardback of 96 pages carrying 61 colour photographs, in a nearly square format of roughly 21.5 by 20 centimetres. The proportions suit a subject organised in small, tended squares.
For collectors of British documentary photography, the book is a focused record of a specific place at a specific moment, made by a photographer whose concern is the texture of a community rather than a thesis about it. Its interest lies in that combination of narrow subject and wider resonance, and in the quietness with which Buurman lets the plots and their keepers speak.
