The gnome arrived in Britain as an import, not a folk tradition. In 1847 Sir Charles Isham brought 21 terracotta figures made in Germany by Philip Griebel to Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire; one of them, nicknamed Lampy, survives and is insured for a million pounds. German makers had been selling ceramic "little folk" since around 1841, and within a decade the figures had spread across Germany and into France. The taste split that followed was about class as much as design. Gnomes were barred from the Chelsea Flower Show on the grounds that they detracted from the garden designs, and enthusiasts read that as snobbery, since gnomes were most common in working-class gardens. The ban was only lifted in 2013, for the show's centenary. That is the shape of the disagreement the polling picks up: a cheap, mass-produced ornament carrying more than a century of official disapproval, which is why nearly half of Britons decline to have an opinion at all and the rest divide almost evenly for and against.