Page 17 - ALG Issue 3 2020

artists corner
The Glyme Lane Project –
A moment in time
The William Fowler Allotments, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire
Allotments, Memorial Wood, beehives, organic farmland – Paintings, drawings, printmaking, ceramics, stained glass, bookmaking, photography, poetry, sound recordings
The work spans a year of changing seasons and weather and has been an evolving project.
Every Tuesday morning at 8am,
starting in early 2019, Chipping
Norton artists and former
allotment holders, Crabby
Taylor and Judith Yarrow, have
been meeting at Glyme Lane, an ancient track and footpath, on
the outskirts of Chipping Norton.
Judith has been using a buggy as an easel, wheeling her materials in it and using the hood to prop her board and paper on. They have been recording and finding inspiration from drawing and painting directly from what they found there, through the seasons – in the rain under an umbrella, on frosty mornings wearing fingerless gloves and thermals, or in a shady spot to get away from the heat.
The William Fowler Allotments, probably the highest in Oxfordshire, are directly next to Glyme Lane and most
of their work has been based here or
in the memorial woods, which were planted on allotment ground at the millennium. With special permission from the town council, a key to access the allotments and with the support and friendship of Charlie Withers, chair of Fowler’s Lot allotment association, they have become unofficial artists in residence there. Crabby Taylor makes Raku and smoke-fired ceramics and also paints. Judith Yarrow is a mixed- media landscape artist. Next to join the project were Jill Colchester with her dynamic figure drawings of allotment holders, and poet Mo Browne who has written a poem about the allotments and the threat of a road cutting through them. Since then other artists have joined them: allotment holders Carol and Sophie Harvey, Ruth Shaw- Williams with her artist’s book of sheds, and stained-glass artist Anna Gillespie.
Glyme Lane will
be affected by nearby
house-building plans and there is the real possibility of a relief road cutting through the allotments and memorial wood. The artists feel it is important
to acknowledge what this area, with
its ancient track, longstanding historic allotments, organic farmland and refuge for nature, means to people in Chipping Norton, and to record it at this moment in time. The work includes recordings by sound engineer and producer Nick Parker of interviews conducted by Lucy Parker, mostly with allotment holders, a beekeeper and those involved in the William Fowler Memorial Wood, talking about what
the Glyme Lane area means to them. The recordings include a cross section of allotment holders, young and old, people born and bred in Chippy, and new arrivals. It shows that allotments are a good thing on so many different levels – growing good tasty fruit
and veg, exercise, good for health
and wellbeing, community, wildlife, educating children in where food comes from etc.
The work was going to be exhibited
at The Chipping Norton Theatre Gallery during April 2020 but has been postponed because of the coronavirus. It is hoped that the exhibition will now be in October. Check it out: www. chippingnortontheatre.com. Tel: 01608 642350
It shows that allotments are a good thing on so many different levels – growing good tasty fruit and veg, exercise, good for health and wellbeing, community, wildlife, educating children in where food comes from
Fowler’s Lot:
the allotments at Chipping Norton
A wide, much-used track off a car park leads to windswept acres of endeavour: Fowler’s Lot, high above the town.
Pay a small rent, you can grow fruit
and veg, berries, flowers, make a shed
to house the rake, spade and fork; a tank, a stout blue barrel, to catch rain; ‘Rubbish will not be tolerated’ and
‘No rabbits, no slugs, no birds’, but debris regulations are relaxed for
tyres, hubcaps, mowers, old prams.
Ordered chaos - a wrought-iron gate disapproves of rusty metal sheets flung onto heaps, effectively now recycled, make-do-and-mend.
A white bath, shiny taps and all,
rests by a careful hazel hedge,
neglect cheek-by-jowl with husbandry, a crowd of jumbled huts on a hill.
Some measure plots in rods and poles, water in gallons (sounds old-fashioned but apt). They cluster huggermugger, haphazard under the boiling clouds.
Way of life, not just a plot, a leveller: codgers or commuters, they’re the same when they look up and sniff the weather, hoping for some sun to cheer and warm.
Autumn - morning glory, late late roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, chrysanths, glads, berries, plums, pears, apples, grapes. Winter - cabbage, onions, carrots, sprouts. Kites dance slow quadrilles above,
red robin carols from an elder bush. No-one shouts, flags flap and tug
in the wind, which blows long and strong.
Alone here you feel the soil turn. Roots thrust. Sheds of all kinds: some are solid, some lean steeply foundations stubbornly anchored. This haven both active and still,
a cherished child, to which we have entitlement, historic rights, soon may be scarred by a dark invader.
Remember the man say there’s a line from his shed door through Watford to Dover, and if you were tall enough you’d be sure to see the white cliffs? Not with a road there, you wouldn’t, never mind the peace disturbed, worn patchwork gardens, hosepipes,
rust, scarecrows, dung-heaps - gone.
Less the sweet smell of cut grass,
Instead black tarmac, roaring trucks,
light dazzle; birds would sing louder,
the better to make themselves heard. Remember them, these small plots of land, fight for the good old digging days,
solve the world’s ills from plastic thrones, turn your faces to catch the westering sun.
Mo Browne
Allotment and Leisure Gardener 17