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.
