THE BUS STOPS HERE!

Derby’s Ashbourne Road and District Allotments has a claim to fame – it is home to three repurposed bus stops. Potty Plotter Elaine Crick explains

- Elaine Crick

It’s not every allotment site that can boasta bus shelter and surely fewer still thathave two. But what other allotment sitein the UK can claim three bus shelters? Strange but true!

The ‘shelter theme’ seems to have grown by accident over the years and rumours have grown as to how that came about so that it has been the frequent subject of conversations among plotters and visitors alike. Each structure is firmly planted on the beautiful allotment site at Ashbourne Road and District Allotments (ARDAA) situated within the centre of Derby and each has a unique story of its own.

The oldest and oddest by far is the bus shelter on Plot 16 which has been carefully tended by Finbar Lillis for the past 17 years. When asked about the unusual discovery on his plot, Finbar recounts this mysterious story.

“This whole plot was in a sorry state back then,” he said. “Nothing would have surprised me as to what was in or on the plot and in those days allotmenteers did bury what they didn’t want! So, when I took over the plot and started to dig, I literally hit what I thought was just a lump of metal. I thought it was corrugated metal sheeting, but as I dug deeper, I uncovered numerous components, including sheets of plate glass all lying under the soil but quite neatly packed and only a small proportion of the glass was broken.

” Finbar then put all the parts together and only recognised what it was when he started to read the graffiti scrawled along the inside of the shelter.

“The kind of things we would have scraped into the metal with the school compass,” he confessed, but sadly (though probably for the best), the words and names have since been painted over and are now not visible.