One sunny day last April, the Canons Gate Allotments in Harlow played host to a bona fide media circus. ITV 's Good Morning Britain had come to town with a green-fingered team.
One sunny day last April, the Canons Gate Allotments in Harlow played host to a bona fide media circus. ITV 's Good Morning Britain had come to town with a green-fingered team that included roving reporter Nick Dixon, celebrity garden designer Juliet Sargeant and TV horticulturist Danny Clarke.
Typical videos might also see Carly claiming to be 'absolutely disgusted' with Rishi Sunak, whose government she apparently held responsible for food inflation. They were duly being amplified by the sort of fashionable celebrities who use social media to attack wicked Tories. Then disaster struck. On April 11 last year, Carly released a highly emotional TikTok post in which she tearfully claimed that vandals had crept into her beloved allotment overnight and sprinkled salt on the soil in order to poison the crops. 'All of the nature that's in the ground, all the worms, they're all dead!' she sobbed.
Good Morning Britain's arrival was supposed to complete this happy tale of redemption via the time-honoured tradition of a TV 'makeover'. By the time they'd finished, Carly's allotment was a model of horticultural order. Carly's allotment before she claimed vandals had crept in overnight and sprinkled salt on the soil in order to poison the crops
Meanwhile, Harlow Council recently issued an extraordinary statement casting doubt on the very suggestion that plants and worms in the allotment were ever damaged by salt. Dig beneath the surface of this curious affair and one might also wonder if Carly is a victim of pettifogging council officials, so obsessed with ticking boxes and enforcing health and safety protocol that they ended up damaging the very community they're supposed to serve.
To understand why, we must wind the clock back to 2022, when Carly became concerned by rising food prices and came up with the idea of growing produce in her back garden then distributing it to members of the public. But she soon entered negotiations to expand her horticultural activity to the disused allotment at Canons Gate.However, officials insisted that a proper tenancy agreement needed to be signed in due course. To comply with the Allotments Act, that would involve Carly setting up either a charity or a non-profit company which would run the site, with a board of directors or trustees who would oversee finances.
At this point, Harlow Council informed her that it could not legally lease an allotment to a private company. It therefore advised her to fill in a form on the Companies House website that would turn the entity into a non-profit — known as a Community Interest Company or CIC.Meanwhile, Carly remained something of a public hero. In May, she was named Citizen Of The Year at the Harlow Civic Awards ceremony.
'Doing the parcels has been an amazing journey and I have loved helping to get as many people as possible through the cost of living crisis,' she said. Over the last three years we have fed almost 3,800 people.' Instead, she announced, she would dedicate the organisation's time and resources to building kitchen gardens in schools.
However, a few days later, a school spokesman announced: 'Tany's Dell School and two other schools in the Templefields Multi-Academy Trust decided last week not to proceed with this venture and have informed Carly Burd of this decision.'One has to assume that she wants to use the donations to do good and, a couple of weeks ago, she began posting pictures of herself handing over novelty cheques, each for £7,692, to a selection of local good causes which had caught her eye.
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