New Ground

Rent yourself a lawn cutter/remover and slice off the pitch into strips then squares all the same size.

Find somewhere out of the way and stack your turfs green side to green side then brown side to brown side.  Securely cover with a dark plastic sheetLeave for a couple of years.

When you come to open up your prize, you will have what gardeners call loam and this is the basis for John Innes type composts. 

It is fabuloso!

Cheers,    Tony.

Just a warning to expect wireworms for the first few years.  They are prevalent in former grassland and love eating spuds.

another approach would be to build up lasagne layers of browns and greens and let the whole heap cook down over winter and plant into it in spring.

The earthworms would come up through the layers and till the soil underneath for you. The grass would rot underneath without you haveing to dig any of it - simple.

Why not grow mustard as a green manure this year, it is supposed to cut down on the amount of wireworms and will enrich the soil when dug in.

@ peapod. I look back on my first year on my plot and wish I had known about lasagne gardening back then instead of scalping off the whole area and waiting for turves to rot down. Would have saved me a lot of work and backache - though I do admit, collecting the lasagne materials can be a problem at first.

me too I spent 2 days a week all winter digging out twitch grass and we have loads of manure on site.

Sounds great Kirpi, but let face it. There is nothing 'simple' about setting up a large plot!
Thats a lot of work for a whole plot (in gathering the mats alone), but is certainly worth incorporating somewhere and repeating over the course of the year.

The turf gathering and Yorkies advice about wireworms are spot on.  I have heard to plant a few half cut spuds to draw the wireworms to a designated area away from where you want your next years potato crop, but have never tested it as Ive never had them.  Anyone else have experience?

Hello    Me, I am queen of the potato kebab treatment for wireworm  Works though, and if you take out every one you see when you are digging too, you are home and dry 

Bobw, can I suggest you also draft out a plan for your plot, as you don't want to spend ages cultivating soil where you are going to have a shed, for example?

There are lots of different approaches to working your plot, and some appeal to each of us more than others.

I have wood edged beds (with bark paths lined with weed membrane) which started out as level with the paths, but two years later are beginning to be more full, thanks to all the compost etc I have been able to add. They are almost rasied beds now 

Others favour a no-dig approach, or traditional rows.

Either way, you choose what suits you and they all enable veg to be grown.

The only other advice I would offer is that the health of the soil is what determines how well your plot performs over time