Anything grows

ALLOTMENT gardening is a growth industry. A decade ago, one in ten households was said to be digging in; now it's one in six. Local authorities - except for Inner London, legally obliged to provide allotments - are hurrying back to the soil.

Demand will shoot up, too. The National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners identifies the need for "affordable housing", in which the front garden's a car port and the back a petit-patio as reason for rooting elsewhere.

We'd last pottered about the subject four years ago, invited by the South Church Lane Allotment Association in Bishop Auckland officially to open their new "community garden". The nubile Ms Dimmock, the column observed, must have been getting her hands dirty somewhere else.

This Sunday we were invited back for the open day. Unable to make it, we re-cultivated acquaintances on Tuesday, instead.

They're coming on apace. There's a new shop, open to the public, a toilet block which includes immaculate disabled and baby changing facilities, a well-equipped office, improvements to the community garden and further work to make cartways from clartways.

There are even colour-coded fire extinguishers and a rule about putting out all fires an hour before leaving. There are quite a lot of rules. "The main one," says association chairman Alan Townsend, "is to enjoy yourself."

"It's such a unique space in Bishop, a peach of a site," says Jim Blenkin, the treasurer. "They'd love to build houses here."

The previous day he'd got himself on television, playing trombone with a jazz band in front of Joseph Pease's statue on Darlington High Row. Just for the day they called themselves the Easy-Peasey Jazzmen.

Alan Townsend says the image is changing, too. "Once an allotment was a place where you got shouted at by grumpy old men. Now we want to attract youngsters, families, anyone we can. We're very diverse, everyone here has a different way of doing the same things. That's one of the beauties of it."

Alan's on crutches, maintains his allotment with the help of 87-year-old Jimmy Coglan, grows cabbages with the help of mulched hops from the Wear Valley brewery, 100 yards up the road.

"It's brilliant," says Alan, "you can get half cut eating my cabbages."

Also in the welcoming committee are Doug Hatton, the secretary and Betty Todd, president and local councillor, who's getting away badly after a weekend watching Durham at Lord's.

"It's my knees," she says, prompting Jim Blenkin to wonder if she's been keeping wicket. Betty calls him impitent fond. It's not a phrase you much hear beyond ten miles of Bishop Auckland.

Doug arrives with a couple of thick photo albums showing the semi-derelict state of the allotments, a dozen of them unused, when they took over in 2001. Not just the gardeners were in danger of losing the plot; developers eyed avariciously.

Now there are 61 gardens, 74 tenants - eight of them women - and a lengthy waiting list. Only a few become overgrown, and the committee plans a few words with their tenants.

The last, says Jim will be "goodbye".

Allotments are also let to the local primary school, the youth club and to King James I comprehensive, which plans to introduce a City and Guilds gardening course.

That they need to find £20,000 for a security fence isn't to keep out the property developers but to keep out the blessed vandals.

There's even a little Turkish feller who, they insist, grows his vegetables in the shape of a half moon. "Nice chap," they say, "if only he wouldn't play his Turkish music."

A guided tour of a site already hedged about by housing reveals everything from little corrugated iron huts from the time of Henry Bolckow to vast constructions in which several families might once have been housed at Billy Butlin's.

Anything grows; livestock's banned. It's 1936 since hens could scratch a living at South Church Lane allotments.

There's Phil Walker, who's a national dahlia champion, prize leek grower Tom Coglan who won first at Frosterley on Saturday, Phil Nesbitt who took second prize in the allotment section in Wear Valley in Bloom.

They love Phil's garden. "A bit higgledy-piggledy but lovely to look at," says the chairman. "The sort of place you need a native guide to get you through," says the secretary.

Phil also flies several flags, employs a primitively ingenious device to entrap earwigs - the key's a Diet Coke tin - and has a water recycling system which would turn green Heath Robinson himself.

Great lad, Phil, they say.

Alan Townsend, universally Butch - "even my nephews call me Uncle Butch" - remembers the days when every school had its own garden. "I was at Escomb, where we kept the tools in the old air raid shelter.

"That's the way things are turning again. Allotments offer plenty of exercise, fresh air and fresh, healthy food. We also want to make it more of a community thing, where a man's not just sticking to his own plot, and to hold events here.

"We think we've come on in leaps and bounds, but there are allotment associations with their own social clubs. It would be brilliant if that sort of thing could happen here."

No less clubbable, Doug Hatton holds court in a greenhouse with tomatoes at one end, filing cabinets at the other. On the wall there's a 1957 Amateur Cup final ticket, a poster for the Silver Jubilee pre-war express and a notice which declares a pessimist to be someone who sees a difficulty in every opportunity and an optimist one who sees an opportunity in every difficulty.

There's also a semi-jocular list of "Rules of the establishment", one of which urges that if you don't know how to operate it, leave it alone. They're not really joking about that one.

An Australian flag flies overhead, brought back - like the cork hat - by a friend who had a family wedding down there.

It's been a poor summer, of course - good only for onions and weeds, they reckon - but still plenty of interest in the show which will form part of this Sunday's open day. Sunshine or no, everything in the gardens is lovely.

* The open day is from noon at the South Church Lane allotments site, near the Grand Hotel. There'll be a barbecue, ice cream and a raffle with a top prize of a two-minute trolley dash around Asda

The night the King flew in

THIRTY years after the King was dead, last week's papers again overflowed with Elvis. Only The Scotsman had the North-East - indeed, The Northern Echo - connection.

The story concerned the only 90 minutes that Presley ever spent on British soil - Prestwick Airport on the evening of March 3, 1960 - and Ian Nelson, the radar-antennae journalist who got himself a proper world exclusive.

That half the teeny boppers in Ayrshire appeared also to have got wind was neither here nor there.

Elvis, then 25, was on his way home via Prestwick's USAF base, having been demobbed in Frankfurt. Priscilla, then his girlfriend, had been left in Germany, crying her eyes out.

He signed autographs, posed for pictures, cheerfully agreed when Ian - then with the Daily Mail, later the Echo's man in East Cleveland - sought an interview.

"He was just like the kid next door," says Ian. "I had 20 minutes with him in a small lounge while the plane was refuelling. He was very cooperative."

The King did ask, however, if he might leave his hat on. "It kinda breaks the uniform, if you know what I mean."

The reminiscences were sold to The Scotsman by Ed Hodge, Ian's grandson, who works for a newsagency. Music to a journo's ears, they even asked for more.

Ian himself is now 87, lives in Saltburn, and was said in The Scotsman to be "sprightly" - a view with which he rather disagrees, though he remains a dab hand at dominoes.

Elvis told him it would be good to come back to Britain, and to see him again. Neither ever happened.