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

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As the author himself notes, the crown derives more income from leasing Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street than from its entire agricultural holdings. The size of a parcel of land is not the key factor. And it’s also inadequate to just look at freehold ownership, when leases are both extremely valuable and powerful curbs on freeholders’ rights. Take home ownership, which is by far the most significant aspect of English landholding, although it covers a small geographic area and is often leasehold. There are still extremely high levels of home ownership in England, but this crucial point doesn’t fit with the argument and it is overlooked. Who owns Britain? A good question, and it looks like there are people about who would have it that you still don’t know the answer. Shrubsole estimates that 18% of England is owned by corporations, some of them based overseas or in offshore jurisdictions. He has based this calculation on a spreadsheet of land owned by all UK-registered companies that has been released by the Land Registry. From this spreadsheet, he has listed the top 100 landowning companies. Painstakingly researched ... having come to the end of this illuminating and well-argued book it's hard not to feel that it's time for a revolution in the way we manage this green and pleasant land' Melissa Harrison, New Statesman 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.

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. 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. This is going to be a great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country’ George MonbiotPeel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions. In 2008, it emerged that Peel was a dominant force behind a business grouping that had formed to lobby against Manchester’s proposed congestion charge. The charge was aimed at cutting traffic and reducing the toxic car fumes choking the city. But Peel, as owners of the out-of-town Trafford Centre shopping mall, feared that a congestion charge would be bad for business, discouraging shoppers from driving through central Manchester to reach the mall. Peel’s lobbying paid off: voters rejected the charge in the local referendum and the proposal was dropped. 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.” It’s simply not right that aristocrats, whose families have owned the same areas of land for centuries, and large corporations exercise more influence over local neighbourhoods – in both urban and rural areas – than the people who live there. The pandemic has reminded us that access to land is critical to our mental and physical wellbeing. Children in particular desperately need wild and interesting places in which they can freely roam. A large body of research, endorsed by the government, suggests that our mental health is greatly enhanced by connection to nature. Yet we are forced to skulk around the edges of our nation, unwelcome anywhere but in a few green cages and places we must pay to enter, while vast estates are reserved for single families to enjoy. Hundreds attend mass trespass for the right to roam". The Argus (Brighton) . Retrieved 26 July 2021.

There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour. An environmental campaigner for Friends of the Earth, he has used multiple freedom of information requests and a large network of crowdsourced informants and number crunchers to build up a credible picture of the pattern and detail of who owns what. Even so, he has come up against plenty of virtual Keep Out and No Trespassing signs, and some of his findings necessarily rely on best guesswork. The land monopolist has only to sit and watch his property multiplying in value, without effort or contribution Winston Churchill, 1909 The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. 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.* An irrefutable and long overdue call for the enfranchisement of the landless' Marion Shoard, author of This Land is Our Land Though the veil of secrecy around company structures and what corporations own is at last lifting, thanks to recent data disclosures by government, there’s still much that needs to be done to make sense of this new information. The Land Registry needs to disclose proper maps of what companies own if we are to get to the bottom of suspect practices like land banking, and give communities a fighting chance in local planning battles.Prominent on the list are the Boughton estate in Northamptonshire, belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, the Woburn estate, which is owned by the Duke of Bedford, and the Badminton estate in Gloucestershire, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. Several large grouse moor estates and Beeswax Dyson Farming, a farm owned by pro-Brexit businessman James Dyson, are also high on the list.