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

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And who was this Ms Mary Davies to be so wealthy one may wonder? A Royal Princess perhaps? A friend of Dukes and Earls? Or, dare I suggest it, even the King’s mistress? This is going to be a great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country’ George Monbiot Farms owned by the Crown and wealthy landowners get hundreds of thousands of pounds every year in farm subsidies!!! Even when they're not actively farming, they just need to own the land, and the more land they own, the more dosh they get!!!!!!!! What a positively screwy system!!! Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole review – our darkest secret". The Guardian. 10 May 2019 . Retrieved 7 April 2021. The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources.

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.

Summary

The question, who owns England? is such a simple question. And yet the answer to this is one of our country’s oldest and best-kept secrets. And the keepers of those secrets? Our ancient aristocracy and elite, who between them own vast swathes of our land. So much so, that only 1% (yes one per cent) of the population of the country owns 50% of the land. The Land Registry only knows for definite around 83% of the actual owners of the land of England. What’s astonishing about his research is how little has changed in the last 1,000 years. His figures reveal that the aristocracy and landed gentry – many the descendants of those Norman barons – still own at least 30% of England and probably far more, as 17% is not registered by the Land Registry and is probably inherited land that has never been bought or sold. Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. The homeowners’ share adds up to just 5%: “A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of Middle England put together.” Shrubsole's Lost Rainforests of Britain campaign attempts to find, map, photograph, and restore the This is going to be a great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country' George Monbiot

Guy Shrubsole, author of the book in which the figures are revealed, Who Owns England?, argues that the findings show a picture that has not changed for centuries. “Most people remain unaware of quite how much land is owned by so few,” he writes, adding: “A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of middle England put together.”

Mike Hannis reviews Guy Shrubsole's 'Who Owns England?'

Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson. 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. This government seeks not to redress the imbalance, but to exacerbate it. Its proposal to criminalise trespass would deny the rights of travelling people (Gypsies, Roma and Travellers) to pursue their lives. It also threatens to turn landowners’ fences into prison walls. Last week I discovered illegal quarrying in part of the River Honddu in Wales. Had I not been trespassing, I would not have seen it and had it stopped. Criminalising trespass would put free-range people outside the law, and landowners above the law. In England, land ownership is “our oldest, darkest, best-kept secret”. Guy Shrubsole, an activist for Friends of the Earth, has dedicated the last few years to uncovering who really owns the land. Using complex datasets from the Land Registry, freedom of information requests, and other tools available thanks to EU environmental rules, he has managed to lift the veil of secrecy: “The long-term concealment of who owns England appears to me to be one of the clearest cases of a cover-up in English history.” 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.