Growing Community: The Klondike Land Grab
A history of community growing in Bradford
In the early 20th century, Bradford was undergoing rapid industrial and urban expansion. Over the previous centuries, rural communities had been pulled to the city by jobs and pushed by the privatisation of common land in the countryside which had sustained rural communities.
Now in the cities, people grew their own food and kept livestock less and less and parcels of land were increasingly being bought privately and often used solely for speculation. In 1906, residents in Girlington, West Bradford, took up their shovels, picks, and trowels and created their own allotments on unused land owned by the Midland Railway company. Inspired by the actions of unemployed men in Manchester and London, these landgrabbers took to the soil to create smallholdings growing vegetables and raising chickens. A more earthy treasure from its namesake the Klondike Gold Rush.
Emboldened by the foundation of the Independent Labour Party and the unity of workers across the county, similar landgrabs were enacted across Bradford. Those who participated in the land grab were clear that they would leave if land owners planned to do anything at all with the land other than leave it empty. They were growing food, but also protesting against what we would call land banking today. They wanted the places that they lived to work for them and not to make profit for absent landlords.
After three months on the land, the land grab at Girlington slowly petered out as funds dwindled and the incoming winter made living on, and working, the land less feasible. While the Girlington Klondike didn’t last, it was a massive demonstration of the power that community has to redefine the places we live in and the impact of their work is felt in Bradford today. Still, many of the plots that began as community-claimed homesteads have since evolved into legitimate community gardens and allotments. In areas like Four Lane Ends and Daisy Hill, greenspaces flourish on land with Klondike origins.
Places like Bowling Park Community Orchard, continue the legacy of acts like this, reclaiming and revitalizing neglected plots as spaces for growing, education, and community. These projects offer far more than apples, fruits and vegetables; they connect communities with the land, promote environmental sustainability, and provide much-needed green space for local residents in our city. The creation and maintenance of these greenspaces are a true community wealth that we must treasure and nurture, and there is a poetry between the extraction of the Klondike Gold Rush contrasted with the planting of the seeds, plants, and root-stock of allotments and orchards that will last for centuries.
However, we can’t take these spaces for granted. We must be their custodians. Some of these community greenspaces are under threat again as the rents paid to run these large community allotments rise to rates that aren’t affordable by volunteer-run, community organisations. Will you find your local community farm, garden or allotment and safeguard its future? Will you cherish the community wealth held in healthy soil?
