Who Owns England?
‘Formidable work’ Robert MacfarlaneWho owns England?Behind this simple question lies this country’s oldest and darkest secret. This is the history of how England’s elite came to own our land – from aristocrats and the church to businessmen and corporations – and an inspiring manifesto for how we can take control back.This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England’s Establishment have been able to cover up how they got their hands on millions of acres of common land, by building walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, they can no longer hide.Trespassing through country estates 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, in order to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public.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.It’s time to expose the truth about who owns England – and finally take back our green and pleasant land.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Guy Shrubsole 2019
Cover images: Science & Society Picture Gallery / Getty
Guy Shrubsole asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008321673
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008321697
Version: 2019-04-16
Who possesses this landscape?
The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?
– Norman MacCaig
Contents
3 The Establishment: Crown and Church
8 A Property-Owning Democracy?
10 An Agenda for English Land Reform
It’s often very difficult to find out who owns land in England. Land ownership remains our oldest, darkest, best-kept secret.
There’s a reason for that: concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it. It’s why big estates have high walls, why the law of trespass exists to keep prying commoners like you and me from seeing what the lord of the manor owns – and why the Government’s Land Registry, the official record of land ownership in England and Wales, remains a largely closed book. The geographer Doreen Massey once observed that the secrecy surrounding land ownership was ‘an indication of its political sensitivity’.
Owning land has unique benefits. The inherent scarcity of land means it’s almost always a solid bet for investment. ‘Buy land,’ quipped Mark Twain, ‘they’re not making it anymore.’ Own some land, particularly in a valuable location, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a steady stream of rental income from it – whether by leasing it out for farming, or building flats on it and charging tenants rent.
In fact, a landowner need not do anything to make a profit from their land. ‘Land … is by far the greatest of monopolies,’ raged Winston Churchill in a blistering polemic penned in 1909. Consider, wrote Churchill, ‘the enrichment which comes to the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities’. The landowner need only wait while other people work and pay taxes to make the city grow more prosperous: building businesses, installing roads and railways, paying for schools and hospitals and public amenities. ‘All the while,’ Churchill growled, ‘the land monopolist has only to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part; and that is justice!’
And that’s why land – and who owns it – lies at the heart of the housing crisis. It’s not because bricks and mortar have suddenly become incredibly expensive. It’s because the value of the land itself has gone through the roof. According to the Office for National Statistics, the value of land in the UK has increased fivefold since 1995. Landowners are laughing all the way to the bank: over half of the UK’s wealth is now locked up in land, dwarfing the amounts vested in savings.
Who owns land matters. How landowners use their land has implications for almost everything: where we build our homes, how we grow our food, how much space we leave for nature. After all, we’re not just facing a housing crisis. We’re also in the throes of an epoch-making environmental crisis, with our land scoured of species and natural habitats after decades of intensive farming. Our unsustainable food system is not only contributing to poor health; it also faces the biggest upheaval in generations thanks to Brexit. And all the while, our society has grown obscenely unequal, with wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny few – including the ownership of land.
Politicians used to understand this. A century ago, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, declared: ‘The land enters into everything … the food the people eat, the water they drink, the houses they dwell in, the industries upon which their livelihood depends. Yet most of the land is in the hands of the few.’ But today hardly any politicians even mention land in their speeches, let alone lift a finger to do anything about it.
