We have a brown fig that I planted maybe 25 years ago on an old south-facing Victorian vine wall in part of the garden - our garden was once the kitchen garden for a big country house, long since gone, so the soil here has benefitted from 10s if not 100s of years of manure & digging over - the rest of the village in on Wealden clay.
For brown figs (the only ones that ripen in the UK) to do well, they need poor soil (as they do in the Middle East) - if the soil is too rich in nutrients you get far too much leaf and little fruit. You need to stress the plant.
I built a large box, maybe 1.5x1x0.5 mtrs out of gravel boards, sunk it into the ground at the base of the wall, and filled it with rubble and general awful stuff (dust, clay, anything that we didn't want from elsewhere in the garden).
Today, the tree is maybe 5mts high, about 2mtrs deeps and maybe 10mtrs across. In a good year like last year, we get about 200+ full-sized beautifully ripe, flavoursome & sweet figs; in a bad year like this year, maybe 50 but lacking in depth of flavour. We prune back every 3-4 years - the following year you don't get much, but the year after explodes again.
To avoid wasps, you need to pick every day as soon as they start ripening. I used to keep my beehives in the same area but they also attract wasps and it was tricky to pick the figs (and gooseberries in front of the hives) without incurring far too much interest from the bees & wasps - you had to pick in a bee suit!
