The Quietly Radical Act of Growing Things Together
There is a particular kind of friendship that forms when two people are standing side by side, hands in the earth, talking about nothing in particular. It is not the friendship of grand gestures or late-night confessions. It is the friendship of proximity, of shared rhythm, of being in the same place at the same time doing the same quiet, purposeful thing.
This is what happens at allotments and community gardens across Britain every day. And it is happening at a moment when we need it more than almost anything else.
The UK is in the grip of a loneliness crisis that shows no signs of easing. The 2024/25 Community Life Survey found that 7% of adults in England — around one in fourteen — feel lonely often or always, and among 16 to 24-year-olds the figure rises to 9%, the highest of any age band. A 2016 study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, commissioned by the Eden Project's Big Lunch, put the annual cost of disconnected communities to the UK economy at £32 billion; it has not been restated since, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a current number. And yet, tucked behind housing estates and along canal towpaths and in the corners of church grounds, something extraordinary is quietly happening. People are growing food together. And in doing so, they are growing friendships that many of them had given up on finding.
A Very British Obsession
Allotments are one of the most enduringly British institutions. Their origins stretch back to the 18th century, when land was set aside for the rural poor to grow food. The Second World War's "Dig for Victory" campaign turned allotment gardening into a national effort — the Royal Horticultural Society reckons there were close to 1.4 million allotments in Britain by the end of the war.
The post-war decline was steep, as supermarkets and convenience food made growing your own seem quaint. But in recent decades, demand has surged again. There are an estimated 330,000 allotment plots across the UK — and well over 100,000 people on council waiting lists to get one. In London, the average wait is around 69 months, nearly six years. In Islington it stretches to roughly twelve years, the longest in the capital: 94 plots across five sites, with 146 people queuing.
These are not just numbers. They represent a profound hunger — not just for growing space, but for something that modern life has systematically stripped away: a reason to be outside, with other people, doing something real.
Well over 100,000 people are on council allotment waiting lists across the UK. In London, the average wait is nearly six years. In Islington, it can take around twelve years to get a plot. The demand tells us something important about what people are missing.
What the Research Says
The evidence that gardening is good for mental health is now robust enough that the NHS has begun prescribing it. The cross-government Green Social Prescribing Programme, run across seven English "test and learn" sites, referred over 8,500 people to nature-based activities between April 2021 and March 2023. NHS England reports 85% uptake when a green prescription was offered, and evaluation findings showing statistically significant improvements in mental health and wellbeing.
These were not people with mild stress. The programme specifically targeted individuals experiencing mental health problems in disadvantaged areas with poor access to nature: 57% of participants came from the most socio-economically deprived areas.
A three-year University of Essex study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, followed 53 people with mental health problems through a therapeutic community gardening scheme run by the charity Trust Links. Over the course of the study, self-reported life satisfaction and mental wellbeing increased by 9%, and loneliness decreased. Critically, the benefits were not just about the gardening itself — they were about the social context in which it took place.
The charity Thrive, which pioneered social and therapeutic horticulture in the UK, has found that therapeutic gardening directly combats loneliness. In a survey of more than 300 people aged over 50, 86% reported feeling less isolated and socialising more as a result of community gardening, and 76% said they had become more engaged in their local community.
Gardening cultivates wellbeing through several pathways at once: physical activity, connection with nature, sensory engagement, and — crucially — social interaction. Community gardening, in particular, provides all of these in a context that naturally encourages conversation, collaboration, and mutual support.
The Social Architecture of the Allotment
What makes allotments and community gardens so effective at building friendships is not any single feature but a combination of elements that, together, create the perfect conditions for connection.
Side-by-side activity. Psychologists have long observed that many people — particularly men — find face-to-face conversation difficult. They open up more naturally when engaged in a shared activity, when eye contact is optional and conversation can flow and pause without awkwardness. The allotment provides exactly this. You are weeding. Your neighbour is weeding. You exchange a comment about the weather, or the slugs, or the state of the runner beans. The conversation has no agenda. It builds over weeks and months into something real.
As we explored in why your neighbourhood matters more than your network, it is these small, repeated, low-pressure encounters that form the foundation of genuine community. Allotments deliver them by default.
Seasonal rhythm. Unlike most social activities, which are discrete events — a dinner, a party, a night out — allotment life follows the seasons. You sow in spring, tend through summer, harvest in autumn, and plan through winter. This creates a shared narrative over time. You watch your neighbour's tomatoes ripen. You commiserate when the frost takes the courgettes. You celebrate the first potatoes of the year. The garden gives you a story to share, and stories are what friendships are built on.
The culture of sharing. Allotment culture has an unwritten but deeply embedded ethic of generosity. When your courgettes produce more than you could possibly eat — and they will — you leave them on your neighbour's plot, or bring them to the communal shed, or hand them over the fence to a stranger. This culture of sharing creates reciprocity, which is the engine of social trust. You give a bag of tomatoes. Next week, someone brings you a jar of chutney. Before long, you are lending tools, sharing tips, and looking after each other's plots during holidays.
Communal work and communal spaces. Many allotment sites organise communal work days — clearing paths, maintaining shared facilities, building compost bays. These events bring people together across plots, creating connections that might not form otherwise. Trading sheds, communal polytunnels, and meeting cabins — like those run by the St Thomas Allotments Association in Exeter, formed in 1920, which helps manage nine sites west of the River Exe covering over 800 plots and more than 700 plot-holders — provide spaces where conversation happens naturally, over cups of tea and muddy hands.
You do not need your own allotment to experience the social benefits of community gardening. Many cities have community gardens that welcome volunteers, offer shared growing spaces, or run regular drop-in sessions. In Exeter, the Exeter Community Garden and the garden at St Sidwell's Community Centre both welcome newcomers, and Food Exeter's community growing pages list what else is running across the city.
From the Ground Up: Community Gardens as Social Spaces
While allotments are typically divided into individual plots, community gardens take a more explicitly collective approach. A community garden is shared growing space — everyone works together, plans together, and shares the harvest. This model is particularly effective for people who find the commitment of a full allotment plot daunting, or who want the social element without the responsibility of maintaining their own space.
Community gardens have proliferated across Devon and the wider UK. The Exeter Community Garden, started in 2011 by University of Exeter students, staff and local residents, has grown from six vegetable beds and a donated beehive into a free-standing, community-led organisation with raised beds, an orchard, a greenhouse and two polytunnels. St Sidwell's Community Centre maintains a garden that is the only green space opening directly onto Sidwell Street and the High Street — a quiet oasis in the middle of the city, tended by volunteers, with everything grown in it going into the centre's café.
These spaces function as what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called "third places" — spaces that are neither home nor work, where community happens informally and without obligation. As we discussed in the friendship deficit in Britain's suburbs and new builds, many modern developments lack precisely these kinds of informal gathering spaces. Community gardens fill that gap — literally creating common ground where none existed before.
The NHS Prescription
Perhaps the most telling indicator of how seriously community gardening is being taken is its adoption by the National Health Service. Green social prescribing — where GPs and other healthcare professionals refer patients to nature-based activities including community gardening — has moved from experimental programme to national rollout.
The logic is straightforward. Loneliness, social isolation, and lack of physical activity are major drivers of poor mental and physical health. Community gardening addresses all three simultaneously. It gets people outside. It gets them moving. And it puts them in a social context where connection happens as a natural byproduct of the activity.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs managed the national evaluation of the 2021–2023 Green Social Prescribing programme, and green social prescribing continues to be delivered in all seven of the original sites. People referred for mental health problems showed measurable improvements in wellbeing, and the programme returned up to £2.42 in social value for every £1 of central government money.
This is not alternative medicine. It is not a nice idea. It is a health intervention with a growing evidence base, and it works precisely because human beings are social animals who evolved to spend time outdoors, in groups, doing purposeful physical work. Community gardening is not therapy dressed up as recreation. It is what our bodies and minds were designed for.
From Seed to Table
There is a particular magic in the journey from seed to table — from planting something tiny and unpromising in cold spring soil to pulling it from the earth months later and cooking it for people you care about. This journey connects two of the most fundamentally human activities: growing food and sharing food.
At Dinners With Friends, we think about this connection a lot. The dinner table is where community is made tangible — where the abstract idea of "belonging" becomes the concrete experience of sitting with others, sharing food, and being known. But the allotment is where much of that journey begins. The gardener who grows the courgettes. The neighbour who shares the recipe. The friend who comes for dinner and asks where the tomatoes came from.
As we explored in the dinner table as sanctuary, shared meals have a unique power to build trust, reduce stress, and create a sense of belonging. Community gardens and allotments are, in many ways, the upstream version of the same impulse — the desire to do something real, with other people, that nourishes in every sense of the word.
A University of Essex study found that therapeutic community gardening increased self-reported wellbeing by 9% and reduced loneliness over a three-year period. The charity Thrive found that 86% of the over-50s it surveyed felt less isolated and socialised more. Gardening is not just good for the soil. It is good for the soul.
Getting Started
If the waiting list for an allotment in your area stretches into years — and in many places it does — there are still ways to access the social and health benefits of growing food together.
Community gardens. Many operate on a drop-in basis. You do not need your own plot or your own tools. You just need to show up. Organisations like Food Exeter maintain directories of community growing spaces, and many are actively seeking volunteers.
Guerrilla gardening. Some groups take matters into their own hands, planting vegetables and flowers on neglected public land. It is a small act of civic defiance that often draws like-minded neighbours out of their houses and into conversation.
Container gardening with neighbours. You do not need an allotment to grow food together. A few pots on a shared balcony or doorstep, tended communally, can create the same dynamic of shared purpose and generosity. Swap seedlings, share the harvest, and use the glut as an excuse to cook together.
Join a garden-to-table event. Some community dining initiatives — including Dinners With Friends — celebrate locally grown, seasonal food. This is the full circle: from earth to plate to people, connected by the simple acts of growing and eating together.
The allotment waiting list is long. But the need for connection is immediate. You do not have to wait for a plot to start growing friendships. You just have to start growing — something, somewhere, with someone.
Because every friendship needs soil to grow in. Sometimes that soil is literal.