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

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Shoppers in the Trafford Centre, a shopping mall until recently owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Shrubsole, who works as a campaigner for the environmental charity Friends of the Earth, estimates that “a handful of newly moneyed industrialists, oligarchs and City bankers” own around 17% of England. In the case of pension funds lobbying to rip up the green belt, it’s the planning system that is (rightly) constraining development, not land banking itself. And none of this implicates the usual bogeymen of the housing crisis, the big housebuilding companies. By examining what these major developers own, is it possible to say whether they’re actively engaged in land banking? 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?

This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England’s elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide. You could see the results of that failed campaign, as Shrubsole convincingly does, as the roots of many of our contemporary difficulties – “the housing crisis is a land crisis”. The laundered cash that has poured into London property, much of which lies empty, has been facilitated by a taxation system that largely ignores the productive and commercial value of land. In the shires, there is a radical shortage of building plots and a critical housing problem, while legacy landowners are subsidised to exploit the estates granted to them when the country’s entire population was equal to that of present-day Greater Manchester. Both detective story and historical investigation, Shrubsole’s book is a passionately argued polemic which offers radical, innovative but also practical proposals for transforming how the people of England use and protect the land that they depend on – land which should be “a common treasury for all”. He calculates that the land under the ownership of the royal family amounts to 1.4% of England. This includes the Crown Estate, the Queen’s personal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk, and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which provide income to members of the family.

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. 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. We also now know that Peel Holdings and its numerous subsidiaries owns at least 1,000 parcels of land across England – not just shopping centres and ports in the north-west, but also a hill in Suffolk, farmland along the Medway and an industrial estate in the Cotswolds. Councils, MPs and residents wanting to keep an eye on what developers and property companies are up to in their area now have a powerful new tool at their disposal.

Shrubsole's Lost Rainforests of Britain campaign attempts to find, map, photograph, and restore the It’s easy to despair but what I love about this book is that Shrubsole is angry but also positive and determined. His final chapter is an agenda for English land reform, a series of proposals to make land ownership more open, fair, and widely distributed. From the Norman conquest, when William the Conqueror divided up the country among his barons, to the enclosure of 6.8 million acres of common land between 1604 and 1914 (“a land grab of criminal proportions”), Shrubsole shows how the land has been systematically stolen from ordinary people: “Today most of us are landless.” The aristocracy and landed gentry still own at least 30% of England and probably far moreShrubsole was born in Newbury, Berkshire [3] and attended St Bartholomew's School. [4] Work [ edit ] Accompanying the book is a new right to roam campaign calling for this right in England to be extended to rivers, woodland, downland and uncultivated land in the green belt, and to include camping, kayaking, swimming and climbing. This is less comprehensive than the rights in Scotland, which, despite the dire predictions of the landowners, have caused little friction and a massive improvement in public enjoyment. But it would greatly enhance the sense that the nation belongs to all of us rather than a select few. A petition to parliament launched by Guy Shrubsole, author of another crucial book, Who Owns England?, seeks to stop the criminalisation of trespass. Please sign it. 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. Shrubsole estimates that “the aristocracy and gentry still own around 30% of England”. This may even be an underestimate, as the owners of 17% of England and Wales remain undeclared at the Land Registry. The most likely owners of this undeclared land are aristocrats, as many of their estates have remained in their families for centuries.

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. The headline revelation is that less than one percent of the population literally owns half the country. A tiny number of old aristocratic families still privately own around a third of it, while those who have joined the super-rich more recently own another seventeen percent. Fifteen million proud owner-occupiers of ordinary houses and flats, whose homes are supposedly their castles, together own only five percent of England. This it seems is probably a comparable area to that held by the micro-élite who actually do own castles. Renters, of course, own none. Gradually, I pieced together a list of what looked to be the top 50 landowning companies, which together own more than 405,000 hectares of England and Wales. Peel Holdings and many of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly, feature high on the list. But while the dataset revealed in stark detail the area of land owned by UK-based companies, it did nothing to tell us what they owned, and where. An irrefutable and long overdue call for the enfranchisement of the landless’ Marion Shoard, author of This Land is Our Land

Summary

Many receive agricultural subsidies which are paid simply for owning land (including environmentally damaging grouse moors), with no obligation to benefit taxpayers or the environment. They can use trusts and offshore ownership arrangements to avoid taxation or scrutiny (sometimes while also receiving subsidies). Properties in high-demand areas such as central London are left empty, treated as ‘investments’, and complicated ownership arrangements mean they may be bought with laundered money. If we look at the Wikipedia article for Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet, the first aristocratic owner of the Grosvenor Estate which passed down to the Duke of Westminster, we find that it was not his ancestral friendships with William the Conqueror which made him rich, but rather inheritance of the Estate from a certain Ms Mary Davies.* 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.