National Allotment Week and Prince Kropotkin

Birkdale Focus has a superb post by Iain Brodie Brown that starts by noting that this is National Allotment Week, goes on to quote Peter Kropotkin and ends by reminiscing about the glory days of the Young Liberals:

For our generation it was not only Kropotkin's ideas around "Mutual Aid" that we found attractive but his 'green' ideas especially in his book "Factory Fields and Workshops". This publication did impact on Liberals at the times especially those like Howard developing the idea of 'garden suburbs'.

The book was republished in 1974 with a commentary by Colin Ward. In the book-and this is where we get back to allotments-Kropotkin argued that if food production was small scale "allotment-like" then the level of production would dramatically expand. His ideas influenced Gandhi and Tolstoy as well as the Dig for Victory campaign.

Colin Ward is a favourite of mine. He manages to make anarchism sound a) common sense and b) thoroughly British. There was a good article on him in the Guardian a few years ago.