the information it does have remains enclosed behind a paywall. Unlike Companies House, the Land Registry still charges for access to most of its data. You can buy the details of a land title for £3 – but with 24 million land titles in its records, buying the answer to who owns all of England and Wales (or at least 83 per cent of it) would set you back a cool £72 million.
The Land Registry has also had to survive the recent near-death experience of attempted privatisation. In 2014, the then Chancellor George Osborne announced he was consulting on plans to sell off the Land Registry, as part of his austerity drive to cut public spending and monetise state assets. Coincidentally or not, Osborne had become a close personal friend of the Earl of Derby, descendant of the 15th Earl – the scourge of Victorian land reformers, whose idea for a Return of Owners of Land to quash the radicals had spectacularly backfired. It had been reported that Osborne had moved into a house on Lord Derby’s Crag Hall country estate in the Peak District, and was a guest at festivals and falconry events in the grounds.
Privatisation posed a mortal threat to ever finding out who owns England. Had the Land Registry been bought up by a private investor, its functions would have been directed entirely to extracting profits from its data, and all hope of opening it up freely to the public would have been lost. Fortunately, a coalition of groups, including the Public and Commercial Services trade union (PCS), 38 Degrees and the MP David Lammy, sparked a public outcry and forced the government into dropping its plans.
In the aftermath of the privatisation attempt, the Land Registry has finally begun to open up. I met with its CEO, Graham Farrant, a number of times in 2016, alongside other campaigners for housing charities and environmental groups. For some years, an alliance of data-geeks and senior civil servants, from the Open Data Institute to officials working on housing policy, had been working behind the scenes to crack open the Registry. Catharine Banks from homelessness charity Shelter argued that to do so would ‘be a massive step forward towards building the homes the country so desperately needs’.
To everyone’s surprise, Farrant agreed. He revealed that when he had worked previously in local government, he’d been appalled at the poor state of councils’ knowledge about even their own landholdings, and how many cash-strapped local authorities couldn’t afford access to the Land Registry’s data. With the threat of privatisation buried, he now wanted to chart a fresh course for the Land Registry; one that would see it both completed and opened up.
True to Farrant’s word, the 2017 Housing White Paper heralded a breakthrough for uncovering land ownership. It announced that the Land Registry would aim to finally complete its register by 2030; and that it would release free of charge its datasets showing the land owned by UK and overseas companies and corporate bodies – over three million land titles, covering a third of the land area of England and Wales. A source inside Number 10 has hinted that the impetus for this came from Theresa May herself. The Conservative Party manifesto for the snap general election that summer went further, announcing a commitment to merging the Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Valuation Office to create ‘the largest repository of open land data in the world’. Labour’s manifesto promised for the first time to consider a land value tax, showing that the resurgence of interest in land spanned the political spectrum.
There is still a long way to go. Despite the government’s manifesto commitment, Ordnance Survey’s hold over mapping licences makes it very hard to properly map land ownership in England. To Anna Powell-Smith, my collaborator on whoownsengland.org, OS remains ‘the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of UK public-interest technology’. And although it has now released details of the one-third of land in England and Wales owned by companies and public sector bodies, the Land Registry remains resistant to overcoming the final taboo: publishing the details of the private landowners who own the remaining two-thirds.
In the thousand years that have passed since the Domesday Book, those seeking to uncover who owns this country have faced obstacles at every turn. Physically and legally excluded from large swathes of the countryside, with debate about land airbrushed from mainstream economics and stymied within political circles by the lobbying of landowners, the general public have had to clamour and campaign for access to the land and for information about who controls it. But it’s now possible, at last, to ask questions about who owns England, and credibly hope for an answer.
THE ESTABLISHMENT: CROWN AND CHURCH
Somehow, I had expected the Queen’s private home to be different. Sandringham House was certainly grand: vast rooms, stuccoed ceilings, great expanses of polished hardwood. Gilded Swiss clocks ticked on marble fireplaces. A statue of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, stood in a gloomy corner of the entrance hall, dancing upon a vanquished enemy. Moth-eaten Union Jacks from doomed polar expeditions hung next to crystal chandeliers. And pinned to the walls were a startling arsenal of knives, scimitars and vicious-looking knuckledusters: the gift of fifty long-dead Indian princes from when Queen Victoria had been crowned Empress of India.
But the house was also curiously parochial. A book on gnomes lay on top of an old edition of the Guinness Book of Records. An endless array of mirror-backed cabinets, crammed with onyx carvings and jade elephants and dinner services, gave the place a cluttered feel. Chintz chairs jostled for space with comfy sofas, their padded upholstery perhaps still bearing the imprint of the royal behind. The heavily patterned, Victorian-style carpets looked well worn. This was, after all – as our waistcoated tour guide informed us – the family home of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip for many months of the year. It felt like a bizarre mix: at once an old lady’s living room, complete with its collections of china dogs and tea sets, and at the same time a regal residence, filled with the tribute of defeated kingdoms. But then, separating out the personal from the public functions of the Crown is always a tricky exercise, as I was to discover.
I had cycled to Sandringham with my flatmate Roger, after taking the train out to King’s Lynn. This part of Norfolk has royal connections going back centuries: out in the Wash, it’s rumoured, lies King John’s buried treasure, submerged in the mudflats when the royal baggage train was caught by incoming tides. But it wasn’t until 1862 that the royal family decided to make the area their home. Queen Victoria bought the house for her son, the Prince of Wales – and future King Edward VII – along with an estate that then comprised around 7,000 acres. Today, Sandringham has grown to be even larger: some 20,000 acres of Norfolk, taking in prime farmland, oak woods and landscaped parks.
The whole area is dominated by huge aristocratic estates. As we pedalled through the arid countryside, neighbouring landowners staked their territorial claims through KEEP OUT signs and heraldic carvings. The balustrade of a bridge we cycled over was embossed repeatedly with the letter ‘H’, denoting the property of Lord Howard of Rising. To the east of Sandringham lies the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s Houghton Hall, whose land is registered in the tax haven of Jersey, and who holds the hereditary post of Lord Great Chamberlain, an ancient officer of the Crown.
What makes the Sandringham Estate unusual is not just that it’s a royal residence. It’s unusual because it’s owned by the Queen in person, rather than by the institution of the Crown. When Queen Victoria acquired it, she registered it in the name of the Prince of Wales, to avoid it becoming part of the Crown Estate and thereby
