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

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In 2015, the Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson lodged a freedom of information (FOI) request with the Land Registry, the official record of land ownership in England and Wales. He asked it to release a database detailing the area of land owned by all UK-registered companies and corporate bodies. Eriksson later shared this database with me, and what it revealed was astonishing. Here, laid bare after the dataset had been cleaned up, was a picture of corporate control: companies today own about 2.6m hectares of land, or roughly 18% of England and Wales.

A small number of ultra-wealthy individuals have traditionally owned vast swaths of land in Scotland. Last month, a major review conducted by the Scottish Land Commission, a government quango, found that big landowners behaved like monopolies across large areas of rural Scotland and had too much power over land use, economic investment and local communities. The quango recommended radical reform of ownership rules. Despite what I used to believe, the landed aristocracy remain remarkably adept at retaining their land and other assets - many have owned the same estates they acquired as part of the Norman landgrab in the 11th century. I was less surprised to discover that many landowners use off shore companies to avoid tax and hide their ownership, and trusts and other ruses to sidestep inheritance rules. Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson. 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 It reveals how the “decorative pomp and verbose flummery” with which the great estates are surrounded disguises this theft, and disguises the rentier capitalism they continue to practise. It explains how the landowners’ walls divide the nation, not only physically but also socially and politically. It shows how the law was tilted away from the defence of people and towards the defence of things. It shows how trespass helps to breach the mental walls that keep us apart.Shrubsole argues convincingly that land should be a common good used for the benefit of everyone. This requires a programme of land reform, similar to that which Scotland has pursued in the last 20 years, opening up access to land and introducing community buy-out legislation. There are now half a million acres in community ownership in Scotland, thanks to their land reform movement. As these estates have not been sold on the open market, their ownership does not need to be recorded at the Land Registry, the public body responsible for keeping a database of land and property in England and Wales. Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has used these 21st century tools to uncover a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public. 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.

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. Shrubsole’s analysis shows how land that has been taken over generations, by conquest, by forced enclosure, by repression, continues to be protected by complicit (or cowed) governments, and that, despite the public perception that the gentry has fallen into decay and handed it all over to the National Trust, many of them are doing very nicely. I have no time for the ‘feudalism still exists’ argument, which one sometimes sees from both XR-types, freemen-on-the-land conspiracists, and the significant overlap between the two. Just because something looks a bit feudal, because a landowner has a title, doesn’t mean that present conditions aren’t deeply capitalist. They need to be understood as such. It’s also ahistorical to claim much of a meaningful link between contemporary land ownership and grants from William the Conqueror. In Who Owns England, Guy Shrubsole describes how his campaigning interests – from environmental damage on agricultural land to housing shortages in London – led him to wonder who owns the land in England. Getting an answer proved difficult which made him all the more determined to pursue the subject. He and data journalist Anna Powell-Smith have detailed their research on the Who Owns England blog and he expands on the subject in this book. Wild Fell Wins Top Literary Prize for Nature Writing". Richard Jefferies Society . Retrieved 3 August 2023.Unfortunately I can’t provide a link to my comment as it was deleted within a few hours of its being posted, despite no obvious infringement of the FT’s moderation guidelines. Although I have no proof, I can only suspect the involvement of the dead hand of Grosvenor Estates’ public relations department who might, perhaps, also keep an eye on Wikipedia. It's no spoiler to reveal that the book does not literally provide a list of who owns every parcel of land in England. Undertaking that mammoth – but entirely feasible – task should after all be the job of the Land Registry. As might be expected, the Registry's continued refusal to see this as its role is a recurring theme. With characteristic optimism, Shrubsole suggests speeding up progress by including "a modern Domesday Survey of all land ownership" in the 2021 census. Shrubsole's Lost Rainforests of Britain campaign attempts to find, map, photograph, and restore the 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.