Once upon a time—for this is a folk tale as well as a true personal story—an Allen & Overy-trained litigator and public law expert took up an allotment in an estuary town in Essex. As he grew into his 60s, the plot—located on the appropriately named Arcadia Road—took more of his attention. As his emotional confrontation with the government of the day receded, the attraction grew of a gentler world of vegetables, fruit and nature’s fecundity. The tiger’s growl of the law reduced to a soft purr. Until one day it howled again in a reminder that the law and the constitution infuse all aspects of our life, even the harmless pursuit of a bucolic semi-retirement.
The allotments had been given to the local council in the 1920s by a well-wisher hoping to assist servicemen returning from the war. Until recently, the council’s website proudly proclaimed its ownership ever since of the 257-plot site. However, a decade ago, a local history project discovered that the registered owner of a section of
