Who Owns England?

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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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

Epigraph

Who possesses this landscape?

The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?

– Norman MacCaig

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction

1 This Land Is Not My Land

2 England’s Darkest Secret

3 The Establishment: Crown and Church

4 Old Money

5 New Money

6 Property of the State

7 Corporate Capture

8 A Property-Owning Democracy?

9 In Trust for Tomorrow

10 An Agenda for English Land Reform

Picture Section

Appendices: Figures on who owns land

Footnotes

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Image credits

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

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.

Talking about land ownership has been taboo for far too long. Raise it in public debate, and sooner or later you’re accused of ‘the politics of envy’. But it’s not a sign of envy to ask questions about how we might best use and share out our most scarce common resource. It should just be common sense. Questioning why the Duke of Westminster, for example, has come to own so much land isn’t meant as an attack on him as a person. As Churchill said of land monopolists: ‘It is not the individual I attack, it is the system.’

I first got interested in land because of the fact we’re destroying the living world around us. Landowners like to portray themselves as wise stewards of the earth, but all too many of them abuse their property for short-term profit – despoiling habitats and wiping out wildlife in exchange for such things as coal mines, quarries and new roads. Later, after moving to London and paying stupid amounts of rent to landlords for a roof over my head, I started to see how land isn’t simply a rural issue, ‘out there’ in the countryside, but one that underpins how we all live. Homes have become assets, rather than places to live. Something’s gone badly wrong when a country tolerates thousands sleeping rough on our streets every night at the same time as allowing thousands of homes to lie empty. Who owned those empty properties, I wondered. Who owned the vast tracts of countryside from which our birds and insects had been carelessly eliminated? I wanted to find out.

When I started investigating who owns England, however, I was astonished by how difficult it was to answer such a simple question. The pervasive secrecy around land ownership made me suspicious; what was there to hide? Why were large landowners so coy about revealing what they owned, and public authorities so reluctant to make the information available?

As I dug into the issue, I decided to start a blog to share what I found, whoownsengland.org. The response was overwhelming. Almost immediately I was inundated with offers of help – from people offering snippets of information about landowners near where they lived, to data experts offering hours of their spare time to help crunch the numbers. Indeed, this book was only made possible thanks to a growing movement of data journalists, coders and campaigners, determined to set information free and put land back onto the political agenda: I try to pay tribute to many of them in the acknowledgements section.

In particular, early on I started collaborating with the computer programmer and data journalist Anna Powell-Smith, who became the Technical Lead on whoownsengland.org. She’s helped unlock the complex Land Registry datasets needed to investigate ownership, built many of the maps on the site, and advised extensively throughout. I’m extremely grateful to Anna for the coding wizardry and deep knowledge of data that she’s brought to the project.

This book is about who owns England, how they got it, and what that means for the rest of us. It’s part detective story, part history book, and part trespass through England’s green and pleasant land. The book’s subject, as its title states, is England, rather than Britain or the UK as a whole. Sometimes, in order to tell the story of England’s landowning elite, I’ve strayed into the other nations that make up the UK – for example, to touch upon the huge Highland estates that many English lords have acquired over the centuries. At times, the nature of the available information has also made it hard to disaggregate figures on land ownership by nation: the Land Registry, for instance, covers both England and Wales, and the data it provides remains frustratingly opaque. Wherever possible, however, I’ve broken down the statistics by country to concentrate on England alone, or else sought to make clear where the numbers refer to other nations too.

But my focus is on England, for three reasons. First, the question of who owns Scotland has already been comprehensively answered by the Scottish land reformer and MSP Andy Wightman, whose books on the subject – and maps at whoownsscotland.org.uk – I thoroughly recommend. Kevin Cahill’s Who Owns Britain, published in 2001, was another pioneering work that took a broader view, and on which I’ve sought to build. Second, I’ve lived most of my life in England, and feel qualified to write about it in a way that I don’t about the other nations that make up the UK. Since I started writing my blog, I’ve been delighted to be contacted by various individuals and groups keen to uncover who owns Wales and Northern Ireland; I hope their investigations bear fruit. Third, devolution, Scotland’s independence movement and Brexit have all thrown into question not only the unity of the UK, but also what it means to be English. Is it possible to construct a progressive English identity that isn’t based on xenophobia, nostalgia and grabbing land off Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the rest of the world? I’d argue that it is, but that land reform in England is a central part of doing so.

Uncovering the extraordinary story of how England has come to be owned by so few has, at times, made my blood boil. I hope it does the same for you, too. But I also hope that it inspires you to take action to make things better. In an old, conservative country like England it can often feel like things never change. But the example of successful land reform programmes in other countries, like Scotland, should give us hope – as should our own, forgotten history of land reform movements. Get land reform right, and we can go a long way towards ending the housing crisis, restoring nature and making our society more equal.

When discussing the size of estates, I’ve opted throughout to use acres as the unit of measurement. That might seem old-fashioned – why not talk of hectares? – but the reason is simply one of convenience. The UK as a whole is some 60 million acres, so if it were shared out equally among the current population, we’d have almost an acre each. To help visualise what that means, it’s worth bearing in mind that Parliament Square covers roughly an acre.

‘It is far easier to cling to privileges if few are privy to their extent,’ wrote the land rights campaigner Marion Shoard, in a book published not long after I was born. Three decades on, most people remain unaware of quite how much land is owned by so few. Enough is enough. It’s time to draw back the curtain, and uncover who owns England.

1

THIS LAND IS NOT MY LAND

Nearly half the county I grew up in is owned by just thirty landowners.

I was raised in Newbury in West Berkshire, a leafy part of the Home Counties. I always knew it was a well-off area; but only later in life did I discover just how much some of its inhabitants owned. Sixty-six thousand people – 40 per cent of the county’s population – live in settlements that cover a mere 2.4 per cent of the land. Yet 44 per cent of the county is owned by just thirty individuals and organisations. And the ways in which those landowners have chosen to use their land have impacted profoundly on the lives of everyone else living nearby. To appreciate what that means, let me take you on a tour of the place I called home.

I spent much of my childhood outdoors, exploring. My parents were teachers at the local comprehensive, and I was lucky enough to grow up in a detached house with a big garden – one that was wild and rambling, full of trees and brambles and corners to hide in. Like Calvin in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, whose imagination often gets the better of him, I’d often find myself imagining my treehouse to be a fortress and that our backyard was an entire country.

The earth in our garden also seemed to have magical properties. It was both a source of new life, alive with green shoots and shiny beetles, and a window onto the distant past. Once, I found a medieval silver penny in our vegetable patch, glistening in the dark soil. Something about that childhood experience of being close to the earth, of having a patch of ground to which I feel a sense of belonging, has stayed with me all my life.

I was ten years old when they decided to drive a bypass through nine miles of countryside to the west of Newbury. In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had spoken of her admiration for the ‘great car economy’ and boasted of delivering ‘the largest road-building programme since the Romans’. In pursuit of this goal, the government gouged a motorway cutting through the ancient chalk downland of Twyford Down, and bulldozed hundreds of homes in East London for the M11 link road. Now the woods and water-meadows of West Berkshire were in the road lobby’s sights. To shave a few minutes off motorists’ journeys, it was deemed necessary to put a bypass through four Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

The government had reckoned without a huge outpouring of opposition from local residents and activists from across the country, who flocked to Newbury and staged one of the largest environmental protests ever seen in the UK. My parents took me on the 8,000-strong march organised by Friends of the Earth along the route of the proposed bypass, snaking past beautiful heathland and through a civil war battlefield. I remember looking longingly at the protesters’ tree-houses perched high in the great oaks that were destined to be felled, and pleading with Dad to let me go and join them. ‘Maybe when you’re older,’ he’d said.

Jim Hindle, one of the protesters who was old enough at the time to go and climb trees, later recounted: ‘The land to be lost to the road was meant to be compensated by the gift of other land elsewhere. But once it was gone, that was that.’ A new plantation would take years to grow and could never make up for the loss of ancient woodland, or the history that the road would obliterate. Where Hindle camped, ‘the rest of the Snelsmore reserve backed away over the Lambourn Downs in a primordial soup of ferns and birches and moss. It seemed like another country, stretching away further than we could rightfully imagine; half wild and ancient and vast.’

Perhaps the potential to halt the road lay in gaining control over the land. A previous plan to put a motorway through Otmoor in Oxfordshire had been thwarted by the cunning of local Friends of the Earth members. They had bought a field along the route of the road called ‘Alice’s Meadow’ – a reference to Alice in Wonderland, whose author Lewis Carroll had been inspired by the landscape of Otmoor. Dividing the field into 3,500 separate parcels, they had sold each one to a different person. This made compulsory purchase by the authorities virtually impossible, since they would have had to do deals with every single one of the landowners. Instead, an alternative route for the road was chosen, and Otmoor was saved.

Could opponents of the Newbury bypass count on the support of local landowners in halting the scheme? A young environmentalist, George Monbiot, initially hoped so. A huge swathe of land in the path of the bypass lay in the ownership of Sir Richard Sutton, a wealthy baronet who claims a lineage dating back to the Norman conquest. As Monbiot later recounted, ‘The Sutton Estate, just to the west of Newbury, covers some of the most exalted watermeadows in southern England. In 1983, when I was waterkeeper there, the manager told me not to cut too much of the bankside vegetation. The estate was the guardian of the countryside. As such it had a duty to preserve its ancestral character.’

Hoping that this sense of noblesse oblige would make Sir Richard an ally against the bypass, Monbiot approached him to make common cause. But then the estate manager published his plans. ‘Claiming that he was powerless to stop the road, he requested that he be allowed to supply the hardcore: he would dig out a further 100 acres of the meadows for gravel. Beside the road, he proposed building 1,600 houses, a hotel and an 18-hole golf course. As the new bypass was likely to fill up within a few years, he suggested that a second road should also pass through the estate.’

Other landowners along the route of the road were similarly craven. The Earl of Carnarvon, owner of Highclere Castle to the south of Newbury – made famous as the setting of the series Downton Abbey – told conservationist Charles Clover that ‘he had been behind a bypass for the past 40 years’, but admitted that he ‘did not know how much his son, Lord Porchester, had received for the sale of the site of a service station on the proposed new bypass.’ To Clover, ‘the saga of the Newbury bypass is about more than a road … It raises questions about whether we place sufficient value on our country’s human and natural history.’ The threat of a road, he felt, ‘has the ability to bring out a love of land in the strangest people.’ Just not, it seemed, in the people who actually owned the land.

The defence of the trees fell instead to a rag-tag army of courageous commoners, many of whom travelled from far and wide. Their tactics delayed the road for months, costing millions; police ended up making over 1,000 arrests. ‘Why don’t they save their dole money, go to South America and save the rainforests?’ sneered one local businessman in a letter to the local paper – a copy of which I pasted into my school project on the bypass, as an example of the calibre of the debate. I remember my mum shedding tears when we went to see the scene of destruction left by the bulldozers, saying it reminded her of images of deforestation in the Amazon. Ten thousand trees were felled along its route. My tree-climbing being strictly limited to trees in our garden, I did what I could. I saved a pine-cone from a tree destined for the chop and grew it into our family Christmas tree.

The unseen influence of other landowning interests may also have been at play in helping determine the route of the road. When the Highways Agency and their private contractor Costain came to my school to tell us what a great job they were making of the bypass, I remember putting my hand up to ask a question. ‘Why are you building the bypass through all the nature reserves on one side of Newbury,’ I asked, ‘when you could just build it through the racecourse on the other side of town?’

I didn’t know it at the time, but questioning the sanctity of horse racing in West Berkshire is a bit like doubting the existence of God in the Vatican. Breeding horses is big money here. Newbury Racecourse is one of the country’s largest horse-racing tracks, and Lambourn, a village to the north of Newbury, is second only to Newmarket for its stud farms. When I was growing up, classmates at school would joke about folks who lived in Lambourn being inbred. They stopped taking the piss when they got to sixth form and started partying: it was some of the Lambourn stable hands with their ready access to horse tranquillisers who could supply the ketamine.

Venturing out into horsey territory for Sunday walks, it was always obvious how rich the area was. Colonnaded mansions with sweeping driveways sat among rows of stables and well-manicured paddocks. What I didn’t know at the time was that most of the racing studs and surrounding fields were owned offshore, in tax havens, and that many of them also receive generous taxpayer-funded farm subsidies. One, Earl’s Court Farm Ltd, with an estate of 2,600 acres and an address in Bermuda, was handed £304,300 in 2015. The vast majority of this was as a Single Area Payment, a subsidy calculated on the basis of how much land you own, with few additional strings attached. But when I tried to find who was the ultimate beneficiary of such public largesse, it proved impossible to do so. Combing through a welter of offshore shell companies, the only records I could find indicated that the parent companies were called the Millennium Trust and the Racine Trust – two mysterious organisations with no apparent internet presence, and no named directors or owners.

‘Horseyculture’ takes up a lot of land in West Berkshire, but it’s as nothing compared to agriculture. Seventy per cent of England is given over to farming, and the rolling downland and river valley of the Kennet is a patchwork of pasture and crops. When we think of pressures on the English countryside, we tend to think of encroaching towns and fields being buried under concrete. But it’s industrialised farming practices that pose by far the biggest threat to England’s green and pleasant land. On this, landowners can have considerable sway, and sometimes for the better.

For years, the multinational pesticides manufacturer Bayer had its UK headquarters in Newbury. The weedkillers and insect sprays it manufactured were sent out into the surrounding countryside, where farmers and landowners doused their crops with them, year after year. Only now are we starting to wake up to the catastrophic effect this chemical inundation has had on ecosystems. One recent study from Germany reports the disappearance of three-quarters of all flying insects over the past twenty-seven years. Another study from France has shown that bird populations have fallen by a third in the past decade and a half. ‘There are hardly any insects left, that’s the number one problem,’ observes one scientist. The UK has seen a 56 per cent decline in farm birds since 1970, with industrialised farming and agrichemicals the key culprits. Neonicotinoid pesticides, in particular, have been shown to pose a major risk not just to insect ‘pests’ but to many other pollinating insects, including honeybees. Bayer, alongside other pesticide manufacturers, has been making them since the 1980s.

My parents used to keep bees in woodland belonging to the Sutton Estate. I still vividly remember extracting the honey from the big wooden Langstroth hives in our kitchen, spinning the wax-coated frames around in a big barrel, while chewing greedily on pieces of sweet honeycomb. But though we could make sure our bee colony had a good supply of food through the winter, and kept a watchful eye out for any signs of the bee-harming Varroa mite appearing in the hives, there was little we could do to stop surrounding landowners from spraying pesticides on their crops.