that the aristocracy are the rightful guardians of our countryside. Many noble families profess their concerns about the environment on their estate websites, and act on them in their management plans. The motto of the Hussey family, inscribed on a crest above the front door of Scotney Castle in Kent, is Vix ea nostra voco – Latin for ‘I scarcely call these things our own’.fn2
This notion of the aristocracy as stewards of the landscape is deeply rooted. There seems little doubt that the aristocratic preoccupation with lineage and inheritance gives them a long-term perspective when it comes to managing land. After all, it’s in the interests of a lord to look after his estate, because he knows his descendants will inherit it. But asserting you’re merely a steward of the land – ‘scarcely calling it your own’, when your family has in fact had outright possession of it for hundreds of years – can be a convenient excuse for owning so much. ‘It doesn’t feel to me as if I’m sitting here and owning vast tracts of land, because I obviously share it with hundreds of thousands of people,’ the Duke of Northumberland claimed in the 2006 BBC documentary Whose Britain Is It Anyway? ‘Yes, but – you’re the owner,’ pointed out an incredulous Peter Snow. ‘I am the ultimate owner, I suppose,’ the duke reluctantly admitted. There’s also a risk that the manicured parks and exquisite gardens of the aristocracy blind us to their wider environmental impact. As George Monbiot has argued, ‘they tend to be 500 acres of pleasant greenery amidst 10,000 laid waste by the same owner’s plough’. And that’s not the worst of it.
It was 5 a.m. on a freezing October morning, and I was locked onto a 500-tonne digger in an aristocrat’s opencast coal mine.
The coal mine in question had been dug on land belonging to Viscount Matt Ridley, a prominent climate change sceptic, Times columnist and member of the House of Lords. I was part of a group that had trespassed on his land in order to shut down the mine for the day, in protest at its contribution to global warming. But our direct action wasn’t just intended to highlight the millions of tonnes of coal that had so far been extracted from this gigantic pit. It was also to point out how Viscount Ridley had used his platform in Parliament and the press to cast doubt on climate science, while continuing to draw significant income from a coal mine on his land.
We had entered the vast opencast mine on Ridley’s 15,000-acre Blagdon Estate in Northumberland under cover of darkness, making sure we arrived before work started. After climbing up onto the gantry of one of the giant coal excavators, we’d locked ourselves to it with bike locks around our necks. The vast walls of the mine with their exposed seams of anthracite lowered over us. We felt like the hobbits in Mordor. It was around an hour later when we were discovered by security, who initially joked that they thought we were Sunderland supporters coming to rub it in after Newcastle’s recent defeat.
The police inspector who arrived later wasn’t so amused, particularly after we refused to unlock. We’d come to prevent coal being dug up, and we weren’t going to leave quietly. This mine, after all, was on land belonging to an aristocrat who’d stated that ‘fossil fuels are not finished, not obsolete, not a bad thing’, declared that ‘climate change is good for the world’, and who was still downplaying its importance just weeks before the opening of the Paris climate talks. Though Ridley admitted his financial interest in the coal mines on his estate, he had never disclosed the size of the ‘wayleave’, or rental income, that he received from leasing it to a mining company. Investigative journalist Brendan Montague has estimated it to be worth millions of pounds annually.
The arrangement illustrates two things about the aristocracy: their capacity to lobby politically for policies that align with their landed interests; and the way they use their monopoly over large tracts of land to extract rents. Indeed, many members of the peerage own extensive mineral rights across England, in addition to the land itself. The Duke of Bedford, for example, grew rich off the huge copper and arsenic mines that operated on his land at the Devon Great Consols during the Victorian period. The Duke of Devonshire is the only person in the UK to own the rights to any oil beneath his land, because he sank the first oil well on his estate at Hardstoft in Derbyshire before the 1934 Petroleum Act vested such rights in the Crown. He also has other mineral rights stretching far further afield: residents of Carlisle were surprised to receive letters in the post in 2013 notifying them that the Duke was staking his claim to metals and ores beneath their homes.
In fairness to them, many aristocrats nowadays are suspicious of letting extractive industries run riot on their estates. Plenty of large landowners have voiced their opposition to the fracking industry – such as Viscount Cowdray, who’s resisted efforts to explore for shale gas in the South Downs, and an alliance of baronets and earls who have refused fracking firm INEOS access to their lands in North Yorkshire.
But the prospect of a fresh source of rental income can be enticing to large estates. Renting out land, after all, requires little effort on the part of the landowner. As historian M.L. Bush argues, throughout its history the English aristocracy has remained ‘rigidly divorced … from direct production’ and ‘preferred the rentier role’ as a means of getting filthy rich without getting their hands dirty.
It’s this combination of inherited wealth and rent-seeking indigence that has drawn down much scorn upon the aristocracy in previous eras. ‘The rent of land is naturally a monopoly price,’ pointed out the classical free-market economist Adam Smith. ‘It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land … but to what the [tenant] can afford to give.’
John Maynard Keynes longed for ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’, noting that landlords need not work to obtain their income: ‘the owner of land can obtain rent because land is scarce’. It’s no coincidence that vampires were portrayed in Victorian gothic horror novels as being bloodsucking aristocrats, preying parasitically upon the lower classes. Indeed, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not merely a count but a property magnate, buying up a string of big houses in London as places to leave his earth-filled coffins.
The most lucrative rental income, of course, went to aristocrats who owned land in central London. A 1925 campaigning postcard by radical journalist W.B. Northrop (see opposite) depicts a giant octopus labelled ‘landlordism’, its tentacles spreading through the streets of the capital. Each tendril curls around the boundaries of one of the ‘Great Estates’ that own London, listing their acreages and annual rents. ‘The Land Octopus Sucks the Lifeblood of the People,’ Northrop declared. Tellingly, nearly all of the aristocratic estates shown on the postcard still possess large swathes of the city today. Where they have lost land, they have more than made up for it in soaring property prices on their remaining acres.
You can walk from Sloane Square to Regent’s Park without leaving land owned by the aristocracy and the Crown. One hundred acres of Mayfair and 200 acres of Belgravia are owned by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate. The Duke’s property empire includes the most expensive street in the country, Grosvenor Crescent – average house price: £16.9 million – and Grosvenor Square, famous as the scene of the 1968 Vietnam War protests and, until recently, the base for the US embassy. The family inherited the land when it was merely swampy fields in the seventeenth century, as the wedding dowry of a marriage between the
