Allotment gardens: a Sunday in the garden colony, 1937

From a high point the camera looks across hundreds of small gardens, sheds and fruit trees to the apartment blocks on the ridge. Inside the colony a woman carries a tin can past her latticed summerhouse and scatters feed to her hens beside a girl on a folding chair; women bend over a pram under a striped awning and hold up a baby in a knitted bonnet; a girl in a checked dress picks daisies, a croquet ball rolls through a hoop, and a shaven-headed man digs his bed with a cigar between his teeth.

The allotments took their name from Moritz Schreber, a Leipzig physician of the 1850s. For city families in rented flats a plot was the only land they would ever hold, and under the Four-Year Plan their hens and vegetable beds were counted on to feed the nation.