Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back

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But to really get under the skin of how companies treat the land they own, and the wider repercussions, we need to zoom in on the housing sector, where debates about companies involved in land banking and profiteering from land sales are crucial to our understanding of the housing crisis. The book traces the bizarre history of land ownership in England, from the ur-landgrab of the Norman conquest right down to the present day. Separate chapters offer potted histories of major players, then marshall the best available information to estimate their current holdings. The One Percent Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson.

This book appealed to me because I had read and thoroughly enjoyed The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland. It was probably only a matter of time before someone looked to the rest of Great Britain. Guy Shrubsole’s writing style is less formal than Wightman’s. He writes in what I would term Sunday supplement style, ie chatty and easy to read, not too taxing. Hundreds attend mass trespass for the right to roam". The Argus (Brighton) . Retrieved 26 July 2021. Public bodies including the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence and all local authorities combined own 8.5 percent – only half the size of the 17 percent which remains 'unregistered land'. Shrubsole's educated guess is that most of this is also owned by the aristocracy.She said one effect of the sale of public land was that the public lost democratic control of that land and it could not then be used, for example, for housing or environmental improvements. “You can’t make the best social use of it,” she added. Some may be disappointed to find no revolutionary proposals for the compulsory redistribution of land. Although the book does end with a rousing call to 'action', in practice most of the actions called for come down to agitation in favour of reform. The Crown owns large tracts, as you’d expect and pays tax on the income from those lands. However, it uses its two Duchy’s (Cornwall and Lancaster) to ensure that it isn’t paying tax on other vast swathes of land it has spread all around the country. A lot of land is owned by organisations like the National Trust, the Forestry Commission, the Church owns a lot too, but not as much as they used to, plus other big businesses now own substantial amounts. However, most of the elite and aristocracy don’t want people knowing how much land they have nor do they want you to know how much they are able to claim in benefits from it. They have built walls, moved villages and used the enclosure acts to steal the common land for their own use. All to stop us discovering exactly how much they own. An irrefutable and long overdue call for the enfranchisement of the landless’ Marion Shoard, author of This Land is Our Land Shrubsole estimates that 30% of all England’s land is still owned by the aristocracy and gentry. The 6th Duke of Westminster at least had the grace to admit that he hadn’t become Britain’s biggest landowner by the sweat of his brow. When asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs, the billionaire said, “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. When he died he passed his entire estate to his then 25-year-old son who is currently the subject of a campaign by activists.

He brings the material alive with examples and anecdotes, beginning with his childhood memories of West Berkshire, an apparently affluent, leafy county, but one riven by divisions by the Greenham Common airbase, and the Newbury bypass. Both spurred iconic protests and both are, in a sense, about land and who owns and controls it. Newbury MP and former environment minister Richard Benyon is also a wealthy landowner. My one query was who exactly Shrubsole means by "we", in the subtitle and throughout the book. Presumably it's just campaigner's shorthand for the 99 percent of the population who don't own very much of England at all, and have little chance of ever doing so. But putting it this way suggests some halcyon bygone days in which "we" did own the land, which is an unhelpful fiction. The figures show that if the land were distributed evenly across England’s population, each person would have just over half an acre – an area roughly half the size of Parliament Square in central London. From the Duke who owns the most expensive location on the Monopoly board to the MP who's the biggest landowner in his county, he unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources.

Summary

Companies own a further 18 percent. A list of the top 100 reveals that the biggest landholdings are those of privatised water companies and grouse moor estate management companies. (As regular readers will know, Shrubsole has a loudly buzzing bee in his bonnet about grouse moors.) Conservation charities including the National Trust own around two percent. There is an impressive amount of research and information in Who Owns England, presented in an accessible way. Shrubsole gives an insight into the work that he and others have done to unearth this knowledge, and explains what they have been unable to find out. So who is right? This is a complex area, but one that is important to investigate. Can the Land Registry’s corporate ownership data help us get to the bottom of it?