Who Owns England?

At least one landowner in the county, however, decided to treat their land differently. Sheepdrove is an 1,800-acre organic farm, lying to the north of Lambourn’s horse-racing studs, owned since 1972 by Peter and Juliet Kindersley. ‘Our original aim was to protect ourselves from the polluting chemicals used by farmers all around us and recreate the original downland landscape that we fell in love with so many years ago,’ they write. ‘We have witnessed the miraculous generosity of nature as the countryside around us has come back to life and, with the return of myriad birds, wild flowers, small mammals, reptiles and insect life, land which was turning into an arid prairie has been transformed to a rich tapestry of wildlife.’

But not all landowners have shared the Kindersleys’ philosophy. It’s taken much campaigning by environmental groups to eventually achieve an EU-wide ban on bee-harming neonicotinoid pesticides, in the face of considerable opposition from the National Farmers’ Union and other landowners’ groups.

The impending mass extinction of species poses a profound threat to the survival of human civilisation. A generation ago, a very different threat loomed over Britain: the spectre of nuclear annihilation. Here, too, the decisions of a large landowner in my home county were to have far-reaching repercussions.

West Berkshire’s recent history is deeply entwined with both the nuclear establishment and anti-nuclear protests. Since the 1950s, the village of Aldermaston has been central to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, and became the target of the first CND marches towards the end of that decade. Another part of the Atomic Weapons Establishment is based at Burghfield, just down the road. But it was one military site in West Berkshire, above all others, that came to embody the terrifying logic of the Cold War, the struggle against nuclear weapons, and the battle over the land on which they were stationed: Greenham Common.

Comprising nearly a thousand acres of woods and open heathland, Greenham Common had been used as a military training ground for centuries, but was only enclosed when it was requisitioned for an airfield during The Second World War. When I visited Greenham in the spring of 2018, the remains of its huge runway could still be discerned amid the spreading sphagnum mosses and prickly gorse bushes that have now colonised it. It was leased by the Air Ministry, a predecessor department to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), to the US Air Force in 1968. Then in 1980, with Cold War tensions reaching a new peak, Margaret Thatcher agreed to station ninety-six US nuclear Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, making my hometown nuclear strike target number one.

The move represented a significant escalation in tactics by the hawkish new US President Ronald Reagan, who had reversed years of détente with the Soviet Union and begun calling it the ‘Evil Empire’. Many felt that the MOD – and the British state overall – had sold out British interests for American ones. ‘The sign at the gate maintained the pretence of RAF ownership, hence British control,’ notes historian George McKay. But ‘there is no obligation for the US Government to obtain Britain’s consent before firing missiles from Greenham Common.’ Instead of feeling safer under the US ‘nuclear umbrella’, the UK was now in the firing line, more than ever before. The investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who revealed many of the Government’s clandestine plans for nuclear war, noted at the time: ‘Cruise missiles may soon be sited at Greenham Common and Molesworth, also US main bases. The Soviet Union would wish to destroy all these bases with considerable speed.’ Years later, when I met Campbell in person to interview him, I told him I had grown up in Newbury. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘Yes, that would have gone quickly.’

To local residents who had moved to this leafy Home Counties fastness for peace and quiet, the spectre of nuclear war now loomed terrifyingly large. Greenham Common quickly became a magnet for anti-nuclear protest. In 1981, a group of anti-nuclear protesters called Women for Life on Earth decided to march from Cardiff to Greenham to protest the lunacy of nuclear weapons. Upon their arrival at the base, four of them chained themselves to the fence, while a fifth, Karen Cutler, created a diversion. The lone policeman on guard ‘mistook her and the other protestors – as if playing his part in an unsubtle feminist satire – for the base’s cleaners.’

Ann Pettit, another of the marchers, was awestruck by the potential for a protest camp at Greenham Common. ‘I thought, “My God, it’s the Forest of Arden”,’ she recalled later, referring to the magical woodland in Shakespeare’s As You Like It where social rules are broken and norms challenged: ‘Somewhere to take to the woods and uphold better values than the corrupt court values.’

Historian Andy Beckett argues that Greenham Common ‘was one of the best places imaginable to stage a confrontation with the overmighty, transatlantic power structures that had grown up around British-based nuclear weapons. A great sweeping tabletop of gorse heath and grassland, fringed with deep-green stands of birch and bracken, in 1981 it was one of the few charismatic landscapes left in an increasingly suburbanized southeast England.’

The MOD and US Air Force had now militarised this landscape, sealing it off from the outside world with miles of fencing and barbed wire. But Greenham’s enclosure fence was soon to become synonymous with civil disobedience. On 12 December 1982, in an action called ‘Embrace the Base’, 30,000 women, including my mum, encircled Greenham Common’s perimeter. Others adopted spikier tactics, cutting through the fence with bolt croppers in order to exercise what they argued was their right to walk on common land. A court later found the protesters to be in the right: since Greenham was indeed a common, they couldn’t be stopped from walking on it – but damaging the fence in order to actually get in was still a criminal offence. Even so, the MOD opted to introduce new by-laws covering Greenham to ensure future trespassers could be sentenced harshly.

The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp maintained a permanent presence at the base for nearly two decades, becoming a rallying point for both anti-nuclear and feminist campaigners. Eventually, with the sudden end of the Cold War, the Cruise missiles left Greenham, and the MOD deemed the site ‘surplus to requirements’. It was sold to the local council and a charitable trust, who decided to finally open up the common again. The perimeter fence was torn down, grazing cattle returned, and common access rights restored. Greenham airbase’s huge runways were broken up, although this symbolic triumph also had a downside: most of the concrete was used to help build the Newbury bypass.

Only the colossal earthen bunkers that had housed the Cruise missiles remain standing today. On my visit to Greenham Common one spring evening, I stared across the heath at the brooding bulk of the missile siloes. Their silhouettes resembled a cross between aircraft hangars and Bronze Age burial mounds. But whereas the tumuli that dot Berkshire’s chalk downlands were built to remember the dead as they passed into the afterlife, these structures seemed to me to be far more nihilistic: monuments to Mutually Assured Destruction. Up close, the silos appeared even more malevolent. Still shrouded by three lines of fencing, some of it topped by razor wire, they squatted: ziggurats of grassed-over concrete with thick bulkhead doors, defended by menacing MOD signs. THIS IS A PROHIBITED PLACE WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT, read one. UNAUTHORISED PERSONS ENTERING THIS AREA MAY BE ARRESTED AND PROSECUTED.

I patrolled the perimeter of the bunkers, thinking about the peace protesters who’d performed a Situationist rite during the Vietnam War to levitate the Pentagon. Here and there, I was gratified to see, were signs of where the Greenham Women had graffitied slogans onto the concrete fenceposts and cut holes in the fencing. To my disappointment, all of them had been repaired, making easy access to the site impossible. But nature is now slowly doing the job once performed by the protesters. In one place, a silver birch had grown through and around the fence, and was tearing it apart.

It’s not just the military who enclose common land and public space, of course. In West Berkshire, as elsewhere across the country, the main culprits are big private landowners. I saw this plainly when I decided to return to the county for a few days’ hiking one winter. The Berkshire countryside, beautiful though it is, is also stuffed full of PRIVATE – KEEP OUT signs, letting errant commoners know that the real owners of the landscape would rather you weren’t in it.

In some places, the influence of big estates permeates entire villages: a reminder that for a sizeable slice of rural England, feudalism has never died. That much seemed obvious when one freezing December afternoon I walked into the tiny village of Yattendon, on the edge of the Yattendon Estate. Acquired by the media mogul Baron Iliffe in the 1920s, the 8,295-acre estate has reshaped the area’s countryside with its vast conifer plantations. It sells 80,000 Christmas trees each festive season.

As I skirted around iced puddles, I noticed something odd about the village. Everything looked the same. All the doors, gates and windowsills in Yattendon were painted in the estate’s official dark green, as uniform as the serried ranks of saplings planted in the surrounding fields. Even the telephone box – that staple of quaint old English villages, maintained for tourist selfies long after the landline has been ripped out by vandals – was Yattendon green, rather than the traditional red. The village’s noticeboard, proudly displaying a plaque for the award of Best Kept Village of the Year 1974, presented neatly typed minutes from the latest parish council meeting. Out of the grand total of five attendees, they recorded, one had been a representative of the Yattendon Estate. It was hard to shake the sense that, behind the scenes, order was being maintained by some decorous yet shadowy patrician operating out of the Big House on the hill, like something out of the movie Hot Fuzz.

But it isn’t merely the colour scheme of villages that landowners have sway over. They also control access to large swathes of the countryside. A ‘Right to Roam’ was established by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in the year 2000, but open-access land still only makes up around 10 per cent of England and Wales – a far cry from the situation in Scotland, where the right to roam is now established as the default – and much of that is mountain and moorland. Down south, the countryside is far less open to ramblers. ‘Less than 1.5 percent of West Berkshire, for example, is covered, and many of its glorious woodlands remain inaccessible to the large population of London and the Thames valley,’ notes Marion Shoard, whose tireless campaigning helped bring about Right to Roam. These tiny scraps of accessible woods include Snelsmore Common and Pen Wood – both of which were cut through by the Newbury bypass – and parts of Greenham Common, which had been closed off to the public for decades because of the airbase. So even these fragments of open-access land have been shut off or defiled by some of the county’s major landowners.

The efforts of large landowners to keep people off their estates have, however, proved their undoing when it comes to uncovering what they own.

I was inspired to try to map who owned my home county by the work of John McEwen, who pioneered studies of Scottish land ownership in the 1970s. McEwen set out to find who owned his native Perthshire, but it ended up taking him four years to map just the one county. Fortunately, I discovered a shortcut, and it was all thanks to the territorial behaviour of the landowners themselves.

Under an obscure clause, Section 31(6), of the otherwise extremely boring Highways Act 1980, landowners can prevent new public rights of way from being established across their land by lodging a statement with the local authority. The deposited statements usually last for twenty years, meaning that any public use of the land during this period will not then count towards determining new rights of way. But to protect their interests in this fashion, landowners also have to submit a map delineating the boundaries of their estates. This is then usually published by the council online, or is accessible under the Freedom of Information Act. Possessive landowners are thus hoist by their own petard.

It was this documentation that I was able to draw upon to discover who owns my home county. West Berkshire Council, it turned out, had a remarkably complete set of landowner deposits. I requested they send me their maps in a digital format, to make analysis easier. Combining these with information from a number of other sources, the jigsaw began to fit together. The results astonished me: it was now that I discovered that almost half the county was owned by just thirty landowners.

Their identities offer a telling insight into the landowning elite of modern England. Baronial estates owned by the same aristocratic families for centuries sit next to stately piles snapped up by newly moneyed businessmen (and it is nearly always men), organic farms, and horse-racing studs registered in the Cayman Islands. The aforementioned newspaper magnate Baron Iliffe and property mogul Sir Richard Sutton jostle for landowning supremacy with H&M chairman Stefan Persson, Formula One racing legend Frank Williams, and three scions of the wealthy Astor family.

But the single biggest landowner in West Berkshire is Richard Benyon MP. Benyon is the inheritor of the 12,000-acre Englefield Estate; the palatial, turreted Englefield House has belonged to his family since the eighteenth century.

Today, Benyon is the richest MP in Parliament, with an estimated fortune of £110 million. One tranche of this comes from the East India Company; another stems from property, through the development of De Beauvoir Town in the London Borough of Hackney in the nineteenth century. Richard Benyon still owns De Beauvoir today, via the Englefield Estate Trust Corporation, with the Berkshire connection commemorated in the name of Englefield Road. In 2014, his company courted controversy when it took a minority stake in a consortium that bought the New Era housing estate in Hoxton. The consortium threatened to hike rents on the estate, leading Hackney Council to warn of ‘enforced homelessness’ for nearly half of the ninety-three households living there. When the community rallied in protest, and were joined by comedian-turned-activist Russell Brand, Benyon’s firm was forced to back down and sell its stake.

A third income stream flows from farming. In 2017, Benyon’s Berkshire estate pocketed £278,180 in farm subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayer. It was through enclosure that the Englefield Estate grew to be so large, and so wealthy. To this day, a large expanse of woodland at Englefield is called Benyon’s Inclosure, denoting a former common enclosed by the MP’s ancestor.

His deer park was created two hundred years ago by literally moving a village to make way for it. The long flint wall that surrounds Englefield today signals a dark history: people’s homes had been demolished to make way for this private pleasure-ground. As the poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1770, in protest at widespread enclosure:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

But more important than Benyon’s sheer wealth is the example he provides of the continuing political influence of landowners. Elected to Parliament in 2005, his political pedigree is impeccable: his father was Conservative MP for Buckingham and Milton Keynes, and his great-great-grandfather was the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. The estate’s paint scheme, perhaps by coincidence, is of deepest blue. In 2012, shortly after Benyon became a junior environment minister in David Cameron’s government, the gravel-quarrying company operating on his estate applied to extend its operations into Benyon’s Inclosure. Under the plans, the quarry would expand to cover 217 acres, extracting 200,000 tonnes of sand and gravel annually.

The existing quarry had already wrecked a patch of land called Burnt Common. I visited it one summer: the common looked like the surface of the moon, pockmarked with pits that had filled with water. Despite Burnt Common being marked as open-access land on Ordnance Survey maps, a barbed-wire fence had been erected around it, with signs reading DANGER – DEEP WATER – KEEP OUT.

The local Wildlife Trust protested that the new gravel-extraction plans would lead to the felling of trees, the destruction of ancient woodland and the permanent loss of heathland. As the minister then responsible for wildlife and biodiversity, you might have thought Benyon would have abandoned such plans out of sheer embarrassment. But he pressed on.

This wasn’t the only time Benyon’s landed interests appeared to clash with his ministerial jurisdiction. The MP also owns an 8,000-acre grouse moor in Scotland, and runs a pheasant shoot at Englefield. Coincidentally or not, as wildlife minister he refused to make it a criminal offence to possess the poison carbofuran, which is used by some gamekeepers to kill birds of prey when they are suspected of predating on game birds.

A second incident during Benyon’s ministerial tenure compounded the suspicions of his detractors. Walshaw Moor, a large grouse-shooting estate near Hebden Bridge owned by wealthy businessman Richard Bannister, was in the process of being prosecuted by the regulator Natural England for damaging protected blanket bog habitat, after its grouse moor management regime had intensified. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, the case was dropped. No explanation was ever offered by Natural England or DEFRA as to why they had abandoned legal proceedings, and Benyon refused to give a straight answer when questioned. Was this another instance of the landed classes coming to a gentleman’s agreement behind closed doors?

Even if Benyon had recused himself from such ministerial decisions, what does it say about prospects for meritocracy and democracy in England today when constituencies can still end up being represented by the local lords of the manor? Benyon may stand out for the sheer scale of his estates, but he isn’t the only sitting MP to be drawn from the ranks of the landed gentry.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, for example, owns the East Beckham Estate in Norfolk, for which his estate company received £102,566 in farm subsidies in 2017. Sir Henry Bellingham MP owns land in his seat near the Queen’s estate at Sandringham. And the MP for South Dorset is Richard Drax – or Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, to give him his full quadruple-barrelled surname – owner of 7,000 acres of his constituency, bounded by the longest wall in England. Many MPs nowadays, too, are landlords with rental property portfolios, as the parliamentary register of interests attests.

Nor is the level of land ownership concentration in my home county an anomaly. England as a whole belongs to a tiny number of people and organisations. Just 36,000 landowners – a mere 0.06 per cent of the population – own half of the rural land of England and Wales, according to the Country Land & Business Association, who represent the land lobby in Westminster. That’s an extraordinary concentration of land in the hands of so few.

That concentration of ownership is visible in the landscape itself. Once you start looking for them, it becomes possible to discern patterns of land ownership, like invisible ley lines stretching out over the countryside. A hedgerow is no longer simply a tangle of hawthorn to keep out livestock, but a territorial boundary. A set of gateposts, previously remarkable only for the carved eagles perching atop them, takes on a new significance as a display of might: get off my land.

To see the world through the lens of land ownership is to survey a landscape of power. Many of England’s largest landowners have acquired their land through inheritance; an inheritance that has often been built on the back of conquest and enclosure. And landowners possess great power over how their land is used, for good or ill.

Ill fares the land, indeed. While our last wild habitats face collapse, many landowners continue to turn their land into chemical deserts or flog it off for development, traditional concepts of stewardship seemingly crushed by the lure of pound signs. In our cities, urban space is treated by landowners as an investment opportunity, with homes transformed into assets rather than being places to live in. Urban land is too often wasted, with properties left empty and vacant sites kept as land banks, as owners wait for their value to climb still higher before cashing them in. Shadowy offshore firms swallow taxpayers’ money to run horse-racing studs, and lords of the manor are elected to Parliament. Worst of all, the vast majority of people living in England today remain as landless as they have always been. I belong to England; I love its countryside and history. But does any of it really belong to me?

Ramblers and environmental activists, when they gather together around campfires, often sing the songs of the American folk musician Woody Guthrie. They console themselves with the heartwarming lyrics of his most famous piece, a paean to nationhood, land and belonging.

This land is my land, this land is your land …

But it isn’t true. This land does not belong to you or me.

2

ENGLAND’S DARKEST SECRET

There’s a huge reluctance to discuss who owns land in England. It’s seen as impolite, an expression of the politics of envy. Some of this is a hangover from an earlier era of deference, when the right of the local lord of the manor to his thousands of acres was as unquestioned as his hereditary seat in Parliament.

But there are also deeper ideologies at work. There’s a peculiarly English reluctance to debate land ownership, some of which has its roots in the work of the seventeenth-century moral philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that there was a natural right to the exclusive ownership of land, which permitted people to own land as private property just like any other possession. He admitted that ‘the earth … be common to all men’, but argued that any person who cultivated land ‘hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property’. Owning land, in Locke’s view, was just like a carpenter owning a chair he had made by hand.

Locke’s arguments lent a moral respectability to the actions of large landowners through the centuries, shutting down the space for debate. There was just one proviso: taking private ownership of land was only morally justified ‘where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others’. That seemed to be true in Locke’s day, when the world appeared vast and its population small. But it also provided a convenient excuse for the English gentry to carry on enclosing commoners’ land in the name of agricultural improvement, and for the early English colonists in the New World to seize ‘wasteland’ from Native American peoples. Locke ignored common forms of land ownership, the inherent scarcity of land on a finite planet, and how taking private possession of it becomes a zero-sum game.

Over the past century and a half, Locke’s detractors have grown in number, reopening conversations about land. ‘Land differs from all other forms of property,’ argued Winston Churchill in 1909, at the height of the Liberal Party’s push for land reform. ‘Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position – land, I say, differs from all other forms of property in these primary and fundamental conditions.’ Churchill was clearly right about this, and it’s a view that is once more gaining traction. But it’s taken a long time for such ideas to obtain a hearing, and for land ownership to become a permissible topic of debate.