History

The Newmarket Allotment Association was formed in 1920, and at that time was a mixture of allotment plots and smallholdings, spread over approximately 45 acres around the town. The smallholdings allowed holders to keep livestock including horses, pigs, goats, and poultry. They were also allowed to keep pigeons, and of course used the land to grow food & flowers for themselves.

Crockfords Park site was formerly known as Station Bank, and was collection of allotments and smallholdings. The smallholdings are no longer on the site, as they have been broken up into smaller plots, to comply with Government legislation which stated that allotments should be 10 rod, which was sufficient for a holder to produce food for his family, and to be able to keep 6 chickens.

The site known as Station Allotments / Bank was approximately 25 acres in total, incorporating allotments and 3 smallholdings.

Before the Crockfords Park housing development was built there was a pit where all the unusable waste materials were thrown, and when they built the houses one was built too near to the site of the old pit, the contractors had covered it over but had not marked it as a potential sinking site. This created a major problem with the house a short while later, and it is thought to have been removed and replaced with 2 other houses, with the pit being used as the garden area.

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