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While the grow-your-own crusade gathers speed, are communities that claim 'unused' land at risk as the law struggles to keep pace?

A line of police officers is facing protesters at the gate to the community garden. In the road behind the police, a giant mechanical grabber and a smaller orange digger waits. The mood is unhappy, tense, but determined. No one wants the garden to be destroyed. But it looks as though, after months of rumours, that that is finally what is going to happen.

The Lewes Road community garden, in Brighton, has been in existence for a year. Until last May, the plot of land was "a disused site, covered with fridges, concrete blocks, stuff that people used to throw over the fence," according to Sarah Gavican, a regular user of the garden.

Kathy Marchand was one of the first group, which captured the site: "We 'd look at it for ages, and we got through the fence and the size of it all, and even passers-by said:" We are here to help 'We support LL "you.' '

Immediate hit

More and more plants were brought in, raised beds built and the space began to take on an air of permanence, with users dreaming that they might be able to buy it and keep it for good.

But in June this year they were told that Alburn Minos, the developer that owns the site, wanted to build there, and that Tesco was interested in renting one of the units. After a month of mixed messages and confusion, some of the garden's users decided that they just didn't want it to go. The police standoff is the result.

The muddle that is unfolding on Lewes Road is becoming increasingly familiar. More and more people in the UK are hungry for land on which to grow food or plants. The guerrilla gardening movement of the early noughties found unexpected resonance with a generation who were attracted to the idea of growing their own food. During that decade, demand for allotments and green space shot up, and councils, which have a legal obligation to provide residents with an allotment (but which have, in some cases, built over or sold off that land), have come under increasing pressure.

In response to the shortage of available land, a number of creative alternatives have sprung up, in schools or as garden share projects. Food and cookery writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall set up the Landshare scheme, hoping to bring together people who want space and people who have space. But these energetic and impressive initiatives have all highlighted the need for a more simplified system.

landholders and community groups wanting land on which to grow food".

The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, it was announced, would help to run the landbank scheme and a feasibility study is under way. "There are template leases already," says Jeremy Iles, head of the federation, "but the idea is to have a central pool so that the costs could be enormously lowered."

There are stumbling blocks. The new coalition government has expressed support for the general principle but has yet to examine this specific initiative. And although,in principle, leases for land seem a sensible idea, there are complications.

Labour's landbank scheme has potential. A stable legal framework could free thousands of sites (in Bristol alone, a study estimated that 270 new sites could become available if there was a full guarantee that the owners could get them back when required). And using vacant land, instead of surrounding it with hoardings, can help to persuade the landowner to incorporate more greenery when development finally does take place.

But the most difficult problems, perhaps, one in front of gardeners on Lewes Road. Sad, in the end, is about creating a life and raise him. Can people put their hearts in the garden, and then just get together and put it down, when the space is wanted back?

The dark place

Marchand believes that many of the difficulties now facing the Lewes Road gardeners could have been eased by a simple legal framework, by having certainty about the future of the space. Ron Evans, an ex-soldier, explains what the garden has meant to him emotionally: "Before I came here I was in a very dark place, I was completely lost. But when we got in here I knew I'd found a place where I could be myself. I find myself useful again. It's been a refuge, a real community."

Would he rather not have been involved, now that the garden is going? "There will be so many happy memories of this garden, so many times we were together here," he says. "We might lose the garden, but we won't lose the friendships."

Return to the opposition, but by the end of the day passed excavator, but so far the police and protesters look at each other, argue, walk away. Nobody wants to be the first to go, but someone will be superseded. Bitter parting with the garden.

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