In the late C18 and early C19 many larger towns had groups of small rented gardens ringed around the densely developed town centre. These gardens were typically subdivided by hedges into individual plots of between an eighth and a sixth of an acre, which were used to grow a mixture of productive and ornamental plants (Lambert 1994). The expansion of the towns in the C19 destroyed the majority of C18 rented garden sites, but a number of gardens of similar size and function were laid out in the first half of the C19, including Hill Close Gardens in Warwick, Stoney Road Allotments in Coventry, Westbourne Road Town Gardens in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and Hunger Hill Gardens, Stonepit Coppice Gardens and Gorseyclose Gardens, a group of sites in Nottingham. All these gardens are registered at Grade II*, except Westbourne Road Town Gardens which are registered at Grade II. The founding of Bagthorpe Gardens in Nottingham originated in two different objectives for alleviating the plight of the framework knitters and lace-makers during the depression of the 1840s. The first was the Cottage Garden Plan expounded by James Orange, joint pastor of Barker Gate chapel, in his pamphlet 'A Plea for the Poor' (1841). Orange envisioned an allotment garden for each family, a quarter of an acre in size, with a brick-built bothy, including a fireplace and enough room for a small bed, to enable overnight stays away from the overcrowded city. This size of allotment was intended to be no more than supplementary to the principal industrial occupation of Nottingham’s workers. It was a form of social insurance as Orange calculated that a quarter of an acre could support a family for thirteen weeks during a period of depression in trade. The second objective was that of the Chartist Land Company, founded by the orator and radical Feargus O’Connor, who used the subscriptions to buy land for smallholdings with cottages to accommodate poor workers. Some landowners rented out portions of land for the creation of allotment gardens, especially after the benefits to the cottagers became apparent. The incidents of poaching decreased, as did attendance in the alehouses, and the cottages increased in comfort and cleanliness.
Bagthorpe Gardens was created in 1842 when Ichabod Wright of Mapperley Hall made land available on his enclosure award plot 174 for sixty allotment gardens, a quarter of an acre in size. Most gardens had a brick-built bothy with a pantile-clad roof, timber-clad interiors with a cooking range, and wells or cisterns outside for water. Over the years some of the Bagthorpe gardens have been lost to housing. The Ordnance Survey (OS) map of 1882 shows that to the south of Haydn Road the gardens consisted of four rows containing between twelve to sixteen plots, mostly of the same size except for a few double plots. Along the western edge is Bagthorpe Cottage which was built in the 1820s and is thought perhaps to have been used as a keeper’s house for the gardens. The building has since been extended and is now a nursing home. To the north of Haydn Road there are approximately twenty-four more plots of different sizes, laid out with less regularity, which were added c1870. Almost all the plots have a bothy and a small number have glasshouses. There is no change shown on the 1901 OS map, but by the time of the publication of the 1915 OS map the gardens to the north of Haydn Road have been built over, leaving approximately fifty-six gardens to the south of Haydn Road. In the 1920s and 1930s around twenty-three plots along the northern, western, and southern edges were lost to housing, leaving thirty-six remaining gardens out of Bagthorpe’s peak of over eighty. The gardens have remained in cultivation throughout the C20 with some decline in activity in the late C20, although this is now being reversed. Many of the bothies have been lost or rebuilt, and a number of greenhouses and garages have been erected on the site.