“Dig for Victory” was a World War II homefront battle cry, and Victory Gardens were hailed as a solution to drought, labour and import shortages as the war raged on. 

But after the war, the ability to grow your own food in the area in which you live, whether in allotments or back gardens, gradually fell by the wayside.  

“Ironically, I think we probably did agricultural neighbourhoods informally in the past a lot more than we do now,” says John Doyle, associate dean of architecture at RMIT University.