Teddington Allotments: £220k Closure From 1 October

Campaigners fighting the closure of Teddington’s last allotment site have asked Richmond Council to check its sums before the work starts.

Save Teddington Allotments says the council has set aside £220,000 to reclaim the whole of the Shacklegate Lane site and convert it to burial ground, and that the site closes on 1 October 2026. The campaign wants that paused until the council has established how much of the land it actually needs for graves.

Updated 9 September: the campaign’s press release said work was due to begin this month; Paul Cuff of the campaign has since told us the closure date is 1 October 2026.

Everything below comes from the campaign. It sent this newsdesk a press release, a financial factsheet and photographs from the site on 9 September. The council’s own costings and its assessment of how much burial space Teddington needs are not quoted in them, so the figures here are the campaign’s estimates rather than published council numbers.

The campaign’s figures

• £220,000 allocated by the council for full reclamation of the site
• £100,000 or more the campaign says could be saved by taking only part of it
• 11 years or more of burial capacity it says part of the site would still provide
• 1,758 signatures on its petition against the closure
• 57 objections to the planning application

“Once these allotments are gone, they are gone forever”

Paul Cuff of Save Teddington Allotments put the argument this way in the campaign’s press release.

Why spend £220,000 before establishing whether we actually need to? Once these allotments are gone, they are gone forever.

He is careful to say the campaign is not opposing burial provision itself.

This isn’t an argument against providing burial space. It is about whether Richmond Council is making the most responsible decision for residents.

The campaign says it offered the council a middle way and was turned down.

Our proposal to retain as much of the site as possible while the Council properly investigates existing cemetery capacity, more cost-effective alternatives and grave re-use … was rejected.

Grave reuse is the practice the campaign wants examined alongside the cemetery’s existing capacity. It describes the approach as one proposed by the Law Commission and adopted by Parliament in 2007. That is the campaign’s characterisation and we have not checked it against the legislation.

Mr Cuff also links the cost to the wider argument about growing food locally.

At a time of financial pressure and growing concerns about food resilience, a decision to waste large amounts of public money destroying our only local allotments is difficult to justify.

The campaign points to a National Audit Office report which it says warns that disruption to the UK food system is becoming more likely and potentially more severe.

“Only a handful of allotment holders left”

Jane Cowling of the campaign, who lives next to the site, has given this newsdesk an account of what is left at Shacklegate Lane. Jane is not a plot holder. The family link is through in-laws who kept a plot there for decades, and children who grew up visiting it and eating what came off it.

There are now only a handful of allotment holders left on the site.

Everyone on the site was offered a plot on another local allotment site, Jane says, but for many people that swap was not workable because of accessibility problems or the travelling involved. One community group still uses its plot at Shacklegate Lane, and the campaign says many of its members cannot get to the replacement site because they have no transport.

The campaign’s reading of how the site reached this point is that the council let it run down over a period of years and stopped taking new plot holders a long time ago.

The half-site compromise, and the cemetery walk

What the campaign wants now is for the work to stop until the council has looked properly at the space it already has.

What we’d like is for the council to halt the full works until they have done a proper assessment of what available space they have in the existing cemetery that has not yet been used, or where they can reuse older graves.

Jane points to the City of London Cemetery, which reuses older graves, as an example of a burial ground that has made itself self-sustaining. The campaign says other London cemeteries did that work decades ago.

Its compromise offer was for the council to take half the allotments, which the campaign says was the original plan, leaving time for the assessment while meeting the immediate need for burial space. Jane goes further than that, saying there are “easily 20-30 sites that you can see walking around which would last them a year or so”, so on the campaign’s reading none of the allotment site needs to be taken at all. That is a campaign estimate from walking the cemetery, not a council count.

Jane also sent us this, on the council’s decision to press on.

I’m deeply disappointed that Richmond Council, despite calling itself a “listening council”, has chosen to ignore the local community and press ahead with the destruction of Teddington’s last allotments, at a time when food security, council finances and biodiversity loss are all major concerns.

We offered the Council a genuine compromise: take only half the allotments, giving them enough cemetery capacity for at least another 11 years, while potentially saving taxpayers more than £100,000 that may never need to be spent. Yet they have simply ignored it.

More frustratingly, the reasons given for rejecting this compromise have changed repeatedly. The latest claim about the central “bund” is simply not credible. It isn’t even a bund and would not prevent the proposal from working.

The reality is that the Council has had nearly a decade to develop the sustainable grave-reuse strategy it promised. Its failure to do so has helped create this situation, and now local residents, the environment and taxpayers are being asked to pay the price.

The bund Jane refers to is the raised bank of earth marked on the campaign’s own option analysis above, where one of the three options is a full reclaim with the bund left in place. The campaign’s position is that it is not a bund at all and is no obstacle to taking only half the site. We have not seen the council’s reasoning on it.

We have asked Richmond Council for its own figures on burial capacity at Teddington Cemetery and for its response to the campaign’s case, and will add them here.

The 2018 strategy the campaign says was never acted on

The heart of the financial argument is a set of proposals the campaign says the council adopted in 2018. According to the press release, those proposals were to assess the remaining burial capacity, to consider whether more plots could be created by using existing cemetery space better, and to develop a sustainable burial strategy.

The campaign’s view of what happened next is blunt. It says that since 2018 the council has “done absolutely nothing to develop this and now find themselves in a crisis with no burial space left in Teddington”.

Its petition drew 1,758 signatures. The press release says the submission was not put to a vote, and quotes the chair of the council’s Environment, Sustainability, Culture and Sports Committee, Councillor Julia Neden-Watts, saying that councillors “are not swayed purely by what seems like a bargaining chip”. That is a fragment of a longer remark, supplied to us by the campaign rather than taken from the meeting record.

What the campaign is asking for

• pause the closure and the eviction of the remaining plot holders
• develop the 2018 proposals and establish how much burial land is actually required
• reassess whether part or all of the allotment site needs to be reclaimed

What it means for you

If you hold a plot at Shacklegate Lane, the date the campaign gives for the closure is 1 October 2026. The campaign says only a handful of plot holders are still on the site, and that everyone was offered a plot elsewhere in the borough.

If you want to form your own view rather than take the campaign’s, the planning application is the document to look at, and the committee papers are where the council’s costings and its burial capacity case should appear. Our guide to planning in Richmond explains how to find and comment on an application, and the council’s spending is raised through the bills set out on our council tax bands page.

The campaign publishes its case at saveteddingtonallotments.co.uk. A local musician has written it a song, which the campaign has published on YouTube.

The campaign says Jane Cowling, Paul Cuff and Candy Taylor are available to speak to reporters.

If you have information about this site, including the council’s side of it, we would like to hear from you. You can reach us through our got a story page.

Sources

• Save Teddington Allotments, press release “Council ‘losing the plot’ is urged to halt £220,000 Teddington allotment closure”, 9 September 2026, sent to this newsdesk, for the £220,000 allocation, the £100,000 saving, the 11 years of capacity, the 1,758 signatures, the 57 objections, the 2018 proposals, the three asks and every quotation above.
• Jane Cowling, Save Teddington Allotments, email to this newsdesk, 9 September 2026, for the handful of remaining plot holders, the offers of plots elsewhere, the community group, the half-site compromise, the walk around the cemetery and the quotation attributed to Jane Cowling.
• saveteddingtonallotments.co.uk, the campaign’s own website.
• City of London Cemetery will never run out of space, City of London, cited by the campaign as the model for grave reuse.
• The campaign song, published by the campaign on YouTube.