BLISWORTH ALLOTMENTS & GARDENS
ASSOCIATION
To understand the history of our allotment plot we also need a brief English
history lesson; the plot came about because of the Inclosure acts, which from
1604 to 1914 changed the landscape of England and Wales by apportioning
tenancy of open land into fields which were then “Inclosed” (with hedges and
fences). Only one tenant then had the right to work that land, paying rent to th
landowner, and these enclosures removed large areas of “common” or “waste
land, which had previously provided game, firewood and subsistence farming
areas for the peasants. By 1820, the Duke of Grafton had enclosed all the areas of Blisworth Parish, and all the land was rented to just 12 farmers, apart from a few woodland areas (which under the Inclosure Act peasants were forbidden to forage). It is therefore likely that deputations were made to assist the poor in the village, and sometime between 1821 and 1838 the area near the old Green, some 10 acres, was designated for 100 allotment gardens, which makes our allotment one of the oldest in the country. The area was originally the Coneygres (Connegars) – ie, the rabbit warren for the Manor House, and the 2 fields to the East were the Coneygre Leys (Rabbit Fields).It seems the generosity of the Dukes wasn’t particularly long-lived, and mining rights were issued for the land in 1860 to G.E. Bevan and Co, across an area which included all of where Buttmead and Home Close are now, including a railway cutting under Courteenhall Road to transport Ironstone mined from the current location of the playing fields. (ever wondered why the fields next to Courteenhall Road, and the houses in Wellspring appear to be “down a hole”?)
In 1901 the mining operation was bought by Pickering Phipps, the Ironstone seeming to go to the furnaces at Hunsbury Hill, an endeavour which ceased between 1912 and 1915 depending on which source one reads. Phipps
bought the field, and some others around the area in 1919, when the
majority of the Grafton Estates were sold off.
The current section of allotment looks to have been mined from around 1910 – the gully and the banks at the back of the properties on Greenside are where a short area of mining has taken place; to me it looks like the area where Greenside is now had already been mined, and the bank is actually the removed overburden (which was originally on top of the ironstone), with the steep side of the gully being the mining face. The rail track ran in what is now some people’s gardens in Greenside, and went under the Stoke Road via a tunnel, down a 1-in-5 gradient to a loading bridge over the canal, the trucks being moved by a gravity loop controlled by a drum-brake located just behind where Jane Percival’s shed is.
Mining does not seem to have been taken up again, and Richard Thomas and Co
bought the site from Phipps in 1935. All seems to have been relatively quiet for the next 30 years, apart from the site being bombed in 1941 by German bombers emptying their payloads after bombing Coventry. Roughly half the site was sold by Richard Thomas and Baldwins to build Greenside in 1955, and a heated exchange between the newly formed Blisworth Allotment and Gardeners association, the Parish Council and Richard Thomas and Baldwin ensued over the next few years as the Association attempted to save the rest of the field from development. RTB was absorbed into British Steel In the 1970s, and the rest is relatively recent history, to be explored in a future article.
The Site was bought from British Steel (now become TATA) in 2025 and is now the property of the Stoke Road allotment Association.
Sources are from Tony Marsh’s book, Jane Percival, George Freestone’s
notes and the Northamptonshire Ironstone Railway trust. Apologies for any
errors – corrections from those better informed than I are more than
welcome!
Pete Roberts
Stoke Road Allotments 