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William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Guy Shrubsole 2019

Cover design by Anna Morrison. Illustration by John Woodcock/Getty Images

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: 9780008321710

Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008321697

Version: 2020-03-07

Praise for Who Owns England?

‘A formidable, brave and important book’

Robert Macfarlane

‘One of the most important books of the year’

Chris Packham

‘A great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country’

George Monbiot

‘An irrefutable and long overdue call for the enfranchisement of the landless’

Marion Shoard, author of This Land is Our Land

‘The question posed by the title of this crucial book has, for nearly a thousand years, been one that as a nation we have mostly been too cowed or too polite to ask. There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour. Shrubsole ends his fine inquiry into these issues with a 10-point prospectus as to how this millennium-long problem might be brought up to date, and how our land could be made to work productively and healthily for us all’

Observer, Book of the Week

‘Both detective story and historical investigation, Shrubsole’s book is a passionately argued polemic which offers radical, innovative but also practical proposals for transforming how the people of England use and protect the land that they depend on – land which should be “a common treasury for all”’

Guardian

‘Painstakingly researched … having come to the end of this illuminating and well-argued book it’s hard not to feel that it’s time for a revolution in the way we manage this green and pleasant land’

Melissa Harrison, New Statesman

‘There is an enormous amount to admire’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Shrubsole is an entertaining guide to the history of landownership’

Literary Review

‘A catastrophising Left-wing polemic imbued with parodic student-union chippiness’

Owen Paterson, former Environment Secretary

Epigraph

Who possesses this landscape?

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

– Norman MacCaig

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Who Owns England?

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

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. It was only later, after publication of the hardback version of this book, that I was tipped off as to the true identity of the owners: the billionaire Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical firms have been implicated in the US opioid crisis.

‘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.

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.

Who owns England has also been literally hidden from plain sight. Large landowners have built high walls around their estates, to keep out prying eyes. The English countryside still bristles with a profusion of KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Rich businesspeople and celebrities live in gated communities protected by private security. For many decades during the Cold War, some Ministry of Defence sites were literally erased from maps.

No one doubts the right to privacy in one’s own home, nor the need for security around military bases. But England’s laws to protect private landed property go far beyond simply defending the old notion that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. For many Englishmen whose homes are actually castles, their rights also extend far beyond their moats into hundreds of acres of parkland, woods and fields.

The civil offence of trespass means that anyone setting foot on land where no public right of way exists without the consent of the landowner is a trespasser, and can be prosecuted. While access to the countryside has been opened up considerably in recent years, the extension of Right to Roam remains unfinished business, and is a continual reminder that the English remain unwelcome in most of their countryside. And if you can’t see it, you’re less likely to ask questions about who owns it.

Parallel developments in the 1990s also showed lawmakers to be overwhelmingly on the side of the landowners when it came to dealing with people protesting about land issues. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act created a new, criminal offence – invented by the Major government to squash roads protesters and hunt saboteurs – of ‘aggravated trespass’, for cases where trespassers were deemed to be impeding the landowner from undertaking lawful activities. This, coupled with the more recent criminalisation of squatting, has closed down the space for taking direct action against unjust and unsustainable uses of land.

Land has also been airbrushed from modern economic theory. All the classical economists – Adam Smith, Karl Marx, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill – recognised land as a key factor of production, sitting alongside capital and labour as inputs to the economy. Land was different from capital and labour, however, in being of fixed supply, and in having no production costs: nature provided it for free. But neoclassical economists removed land as a separate factor of production, conflating it with capital. Land, despite being finite and thus a constraint upon economic activities, was no longer treated as such.

But most tellingly of all, public discussion of land ownership has been hampered and stymied for centuries by the near-impossibility of obtaining proper information on it. Accurate facts, figures and maps detailing the ownership of land in England are very hard to come by.

Charges of conspiracy are flung about wearyingly often in modern politics. But the long-term concealment of who owns England appears to me to be one of the clearest cases of a cover-up in English history. To understand its depths, we have to go back a thousand years, to Domesday.

The Domesday Book was the first comprehensive survey by any European monarchy of the owners and occupiers of land in their domain. It was, to put it bluntly, a swag list assembled by an acquisitive king. William the Conqueror commissioned Domesday in 1085, nineteen years after his conquest of England, in order to better understand who owned what, so he could tax them more in future. The anonymous scribe behind the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that King William ‘sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out … what, or how much, each man had, who was an occupier of land in England, either in land or in stock, and how much money it were worth’.

The significance of the Domesday survey is twofold. First, it was the first official state record of who owned England; and second, nothing like it was carried out again for another eight hundred years.

For eight centuries, Crown, Church and aristocracy hid their landholdings away, fenced off and out of public view. The Domesday Book was preserved and referred to, but mostly as a means for the Crown to extract taxes and settle disputes over legal title to land. There was little sense of it being a public record that might aid demands for wealth redistribution. Occasionally, it was used to try to turn the tables. In 1377, a ‘Great Rumour’ began spreading among peasants that Domesday Book granted them ancient rights to land that exempted them from feudal duties. The resulting protests, though short-lived, were a precursor to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. A similar moment of revolutionary possibility appeared in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Parliament, freshly victorious, carried out a survey of Crown lands belonging to the recently executed Charles I in order to auction them off. But more radical demands to redistribute land and give every man the vote were brutally quashed by Cromwell.

Yet in the past two hundred years, as England has become an industrial democracy, its governments have chosen to survey land ownership on multiple occasions, only to swiftly suppress knowledge of these activities. The past two centuries have seen four ‘modern Domesdays’ carried out by the authorities: the Tithe Maps of the 1830s; the 1873 Return of Owners of Land; the 1910–15 Valuation Maps; and the 1941 National Farm Survey. In each case these investigations faced huge opposition, were hushed up swiftly after they were carried out, and today have been almost entirely forgotten.

The first of these modern Domesdays occurred in the context of the upheaval generated by the French Revolution, which had caused the boulevards of Paris to run red with the blood of guillotined aristocrats and seen revolutionary Jacobins seize their lands. Napoleon ended the bloodshed but imposed new land taxes to finance wars abroad, levied with the help of a new system of land ownership maps called cadastres. These recorded not just the contours of hills and locations of buildings, but also the boundaries of estates – and who owned them. In turn, the Napoleonic Wars prompted the British state to grow, modernise and extend its powers. The British government began counting its population with the first decadal Census, and started to map its territories accurately with the creation of the Ordnance Survey, so that it could better defend them. But in order to impose cadastral maps and land taxes, the authorities would inevitably run into opposition from landowning interests.

In England, it was in fact the Church, rather than the state, that first attempted a system of cadastral maps. The Church was modernising too, through the monetisation of tithe payments. For centuries it had been customary for farmers and landowners to pay to the Church one-tenth of their produce, levied in kind. This continued, despite the Reformation, until modern times. Then in 1836, the Tithe Commutation Act allowed tithes to be paid in cash rather than in goods. As part of the process of commutation, tithe maps were to be drawn up, to show who owned a parcel of land and how much they owed in tithes.

Into this process stepped Lieutenant Robert Dawson, a mapmaker with utopian dreams. Dawson was a cartographer who had been seconded to the Tithe Commission from the Royal Engineers. He knew that for the purposes of collecting tithes, fully accurate maps of land ownership weren’t strictly necessary. But Dawson saw this as an opportunity to push a much larger, more ambitious project – a detailed cadastral survey of the entire country.

The Tithe Commission was at first enthusiastic, and backed Dawson’s proposals. They implored the government to help fund the accurate mapping of landowners, writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who appointed a select committee of MPs to examine the matter. But while the committee was hearing evidence, ‘groups of landowners petitioned the House of Commons requesting that the tithe commissioners’ proposals for large-scale maps be defeated’. The English aristocracy feared that a full survey of land ownership might pave the way for new land taxes, as Napoleon’s cadastral surveys had on the Continent, or – worse – lead to social upheaval and even revolution. The committee concurred, and ‘an opportunity for a cadastral survey of the full kingdom was lost’. Many tithe maps were still produced, but their coverage was incomplete, and in many cases lacking in detail.

Others, however, continued to press for a public register of land ownership. In May 1848, Lord Brougham, a lawyer and former Lord Chancellor, made the case in Parliament for a Land Registry complete with cadastral maps. ‘I need hardly dwell on the benefits of a registry for securing titles and facilitating transfers of property,’ he told his fellow peers. ‘England is nearly the only country which is still without this advantage … Connected with a registry should be an authentic and detailed map, the result of a survey of each county or smaller district – what the French call a Cadastre.’

Brougham sought to appeal to the landed establishment, explaining that a register of land could ‘improve the security of its possessors, and … increase the facility of its transfer’. It was an argument he felt should appeal ‘to the Members of this House, peculiarly the lords, as you are, of the soil of England’. But his speech also hinted at support for land redistribution. ‘It was reckoned by Dr. Beke, in 1801, that there were not more than 200,000 owners of land in England,’ Brougham related, compared to many millions of small landowners in France: ‘No one can believe that the working of any system is good which confines landed property to so few hands.’

His was a lone voice, however, and he had to wait: a Land Registry was eventually established, but not until 1862. Moreover, for decades after its creation, it registered pitifully little land – registration was voluntary rather than compulsory – and it was not a public register.

In the absence of a proper public Land Registry, advocates of land reform had to make do with proxy figures. The 1861 Census provoked a commotion among radicals, as its records seemed to show there were just 30,000 landowners in a population of some 20 million people – although the census said nothing about how much each owned. This was grist to the mill of a new generation of radical liberals and socialists who wanted to see the grinding poverty of the Victorian slums redressed through a fairer distribution of wealth. It was also dynamite for democrats advocating an extension of the electoral franchise and the abolition of the ‘property qualification’ – the need to own land or capital in order to vote.

The 15th Earl of Derby – himself a major landowner, and the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister – sought to stamp out calls for land reform by disproving these claims. Addressing the House of Lords on 19 February 1872, he asked the Lord Privy Seal ‘whether it is the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to take any steps for ascertaining accurately the number of Proprietors of Land or Houses in the United Kingdom, with the quantity of land owned by each?’ An accurate survey would be a public service, Derby went on, for currently there was a ‘great outcry raised about what was called the monopoly of land, and, in support of that cry, the wildest and most reckless exaggerations and misstatements of fact were uttered as to the number of persons who were the actual owners of the soil’.

Viscount Halifax, responding for the government, agreed, opining that ‘for statistical purposes, he thought that we ought to know the number of owners of land in the United Kingdom, and there would be no difficulty in obtaining this information’.

Halifax duly tasked the Local Government Board with preparing a Return of Owners of Land. Unlike the original Domesday, this was not produced by sending out surveyors, but by compiling and checking statistics already gathered on land and property ownership for the purposes of the Poor Law. This in itself was no mean feat: as is noted in the preface to the return, ‘upwards of 300,000 separate applications had to be sent to the clerks in order to clear up questions in reference to duplicate entries’. No maps were made, but addresses were recorded.

The Return of Owners of Land was finally published, ‘after considerable but unavoidable delay’, in July 1875. Its initial conclusions gave heart to the landed governing classes: there were, in fact, some 972,836 owners of land in England and Wales, outside of London. Yet 703,289 were owners of less than an acre, leaving 269,547 who owned an acre or above. Even this, the clerks pointed out, was likely an overestimate, based on county-level figures: anyone who owned land in multiple counties would be double-counted.

It fell to an author and country squire, John Bateman, to interpret and popularise the return. In 1876 he published The Acre-Ocracy of England, in which he summarised the owners of 3,000 acres and above. It became a best-seller, going through four editions and updates which culminated in Bateman’s last work on the subject in 1883, The Great Land-Owners of Great Britain and Ireland. Bateman’s analysis confirmed the radicals’ worst fears: just 4,000 families owned over half the country. Meanwhile, 95 per cent of the population owned nothing at all. The landed elite had been exposed.

The return was swiftly buried because of its embarrassing findings. Landowners hated it. It was set upon by The Times, Tory in its politics, which declared that ‘the legend of 30,000 landowners has been found to be as mythical as that of St Ursula and her company of 10,000 virgins’. It was castigated by politicians, such as the MP George Brodrick, who criticised it for inaccuracies and double-counting, even though these errors had been easily corrected by John Bateman in his summaries. Radicals failed to fully capitalise on its findings; although a number of MPs stood in the 1885 election on a promise of ‘three acres and a cow’ for landless farmers, the most they achieved in terms of policy was the 1887 Allotments Act. The moment passed; time moved on; and the return was forgotten.

The third ‘modern Domesday’ was attempted a generation later. In 1906, the Liberals were swept to power in a landslide election victory, bringing to an end the Conservative hegemony that had dominated British politics since the mid-1880s. The New Liberalism of the twentieth century was committed to much greater state intervention than the laissez-faire policies of Victorian Liberals, including a greater willingness to introduce new taxes to pay for social welfare. One aspect of the New Liberalism was a fresh commitment to land reform.

By now land reform had won the support of two of the century’s greatest statesmen: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Churchill, then a Liberal MP, wrote in his 1909 book The People’s Rights about the ‘evils of an unreformed and vicious land system’. He railed against ‘the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing’. Churchill’s solution to this social evil was to introduce a land value tax. A 20 per cent tax would be levied on the future unearned increase in land values. To do so, however, would require a full survey of the ownership and value of land across the country.

The Chancellor, Lloyd George, put forward such a tax in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, alongside hikes in income tax for the wealthy and a super-tax on the very richest. When the ensuing vote triggered a constitutional crisis over which chamber of Parliament held the upper hand, the government went to the country to obtain a fresh mandate; the Liberals were returned to power, albeit only with the support of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs, and the People’s Budget was forced through the Lords.

In order to levy the new land value tax, current site values needed to be known; so a valuation survey was set up, dubbed ‘Lloyd George’s Domesday’. It took five years to carry out and involved the detailed mapping of land ownership across the whole country, using Ordnance Survey maps. This makes it an even more valuable resource than the Return of Owners of Land, which only noted the acreage owned, not where it was. It produced an astonishing volume of data: some 50,000 maps and 95,000 ledgers describing the owners and values of around nine million houses, farms and other properties.

The Liberals’ land value tax, however, came to a sorry end. Interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and with revenues from it outweighed by the costs of implementation, it was repealed in the 1920 Finance Act, under a government nominally still led by Lloyd George but dominated by the Conservative Party.

I spoke to Professor Brian Short, an academic who has researched the valuation survey extensively, and asked him whether any headline findings exist of who owned England at the time. ‘The 1910–15 survey remained unfinished at the start of the war, and stayed that way through to the repeal of the legislation after the war,’ he told me. ‘There was, unfortunately, no attempt to bring the massive amount of information to any summary conclusion – or at least none that I know of.’ He added: ‘I fear that the English have been very coy about landownership, and remain so.’

Scottish land reform campaigner Andy Wightman agrees, noting that ‘as the twentieth century wore on, people forgot that there had ever been such records. The public had never had access to them in any case and … their very existence was very effectively concealed from all but those working in the Inland Revenue and valuation profession.’ They were eventually declassified and remain in the National Archives, but have never been digitised.

Frustratingly, the moment was also a missed opportunity to rescue the floundering Land Registry, which continued to register land at a pathetically slow rate. The Land Registry’s own official history admits that in 1909, its chief registrar had suggested ‘the setting up of a “Domesday Office” – a merger of the Land Registry, Valuation Office and Ordnance Survey. The ownership records being compiled by the Valuation Office would have then been used to create a land register for the whole country … Lloyd George was in favour, but Lord Chancellor Haldane was opposed. Had the scheme been adopted, the Land Register would have been completed by now.’ Those words were written nearly twenty years ago.

The last and most recent of the modern Domesdays had a rather different aim. It sought not to tax the rich, but to ensure the country could feed itself in the face of total war. With shipping under assault from German U-boats and the country facing the threat of Nazi invasion, Britain embarked on ‘Dig for Victory’. The domestic side of this is well known: rationing, allotments, parks dug up for growing vegetables. Less appreciated today is the effort that went into identifying rural land that wasn’t being farmed, or had fallen into disuse during the agricultural depressions of the late Victorian period and inter-war years.

To this end, Churchill’s War Ministry mandated a National Farm Survey, overseen by the new War Agricultural Committees set up to direct farming. The initial survey was carried out in 1940–1, followed by a larger, two-year survey intended to inform post-war planning. This was seen at the time as a ‘Second Domesday’ – which tells you how quickly the other modern Domesdays had been hushed up or forgotten.

Though principally an investigation into land use, the National Farm Survey also interrogated ownership and tenancy. It covered all farms over five acres – around 320,000 farms in total – covering 99 per cent of agricultural land in England & Wales. However, as an academic paper on the 1941 survey notes, although the ‘results were intended to be for use by planners and agricultural advisors, the original records were not made available for general inspection’ until 1992. And while various historical studies have now been done using the National Farm Survey, the records remain on paper only, stored in the National Archives. A 2006 report made the case for digitisation of all the maps, but so far, no funder has been found.

What of the languishing Land Registry? Since its foundation in 1862 it had proved an embarrassing failure, and despite several further Acts intended to kickstart it – as well as the missed opportunity of 1909 – its progress remained glacial. Registration of land upon point of sale finally became compulsory after 1925, leading to an increase in activity. All information on who owned land, however, remained tightly guarded.

Incredibly, not even the police were allowed to access Land Registry records without the landowner’s permission, thanks to Section 112 of the 1925 Land Registration Act. This clearly hindered efforts to investigate corruption and money laundering. In the 1970s, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Land Registry pleading for greater transparency. In a document deposited at the National Archives, dated 18 November 1975, an anonymous official refers to the correspondence, and admits: ‘the Deputy Chief Land Registrar has told me that the Registry is embarrassed by the extreme restriction imposed by Section 112 and would welcome an amendment’. But he adds: ‘On the other hand he did not think a greater liberalisation than that was called for – there was no reason why information about a person’s mortgages should be freely available.’

This neurotic secrecy was of a piece with Whitehall’s general paranoia during the Cold War. But by the 1970s, a less deferential public and a more inquisitorial press were starting to demand answers from government. The decade also saw a revival of interest in land ownership, prompted by a rise in land and house prices, concerns about financial speculators buying up farmland, and disquiet over wealthy sheikhs snapping up London properties in the wake of the oil crisis.

In 1973, on the centenary of the Return of Owners of Land, a Sunday Times journalist, Michael Pye, decided to write a feature story about land ownership for the paper’s colour supplement. He wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), ‘We plan to contrast the top ten land holdings in 1873 with the largest ten today. I would be very grateful if you could help me in this exercise by letting me have access to a map of your land holdings … with perhaps an approximate figure for the total acreage involved.’

It was an anodyne and courteous request, but even this caused ructions at the department. An internal memo from a civil servant dealing with the request advised his superior: ‘The problem is to provide the information requested without evoking further questions about politically sensitive matters … I trust you are satisfied that this presentation will prove acceptable … and will avoid as far as possible any embarrassing enquiries.’

A trade union researcher who dared to enquire about MAFF landholdings the following year got similarly short shrift. ‘Are we required to provide this? – It doesn’t seem much of their business!’ exclaimed one mandarin in a handwritten note; to which another civil servant responded: ‘I suggest a polite reply regretting that the information cannot be obtained without undue effort – provided that is true of course.’ It wasn’t; the information proved easy to compile.

When the Spectator journalist Stephen Glover tried to write a piece on who owned the country in 1977, he found the only way to get the necessary information was to contact the landowners themselves. ‘This was usually done on the telephone and naturally entailed difficulties,’ he recounted. ‘Often, the landowner was out shooting; once he unfortunately turned out to be dead; and once he was drunk. One landowner could not decide whether he owned 10,000 acres or 100,000 acres: “I do find it so difficult to remember what an acre looks like when I drive across the estate.”’

MPs had begun asking questions, too. The Labour government that took power in 1974 soon set up two inquiries that aimed to probe the concentration of land ownership. The first of these, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, tried to investigate who owned England, but was forced to conclude: ‘The paucity of comprehensive up-to-date information on land ownership is remarkable. In the absence of a survey yielding data on the lines of the 1873 survey it is difficult to carry our analysis any further.’

The second, the Northfield Inquiry into the Acquisition and Occupancy of Agricultural Land, got some way further. But although its 1979 report forms a valuable record of the agricultural land then owned by the public sector, financial institutions, and the then small number of overseas buyers, it strangely didn’t seek to investigate the large private landowners who own the great majority of land. Then Margaret Thatcher swept into office, and once again the moment for land reform was lost.

By now, however, many NGOs and investigative journalists were determined to break open the ‘secret state’ regardless of which party was in government. The Campaign for Freedom of Information was set up in 1984, perhaps an appropriate year for founding an organisation dedicated to the rights of the citizen against the overmighty state. It aimed to dismantle the culture of secrecy that pervaded Whitehall, and give people new tools by which to hold government to account. For fifteen years, under the direction of Maurice ‘Freedom’ Frankel, it campaigned tirelessly for a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to give citizens the right to know what information was being held by public bodies.

The FOI Act finally came into force in 2005. Now, anyone can request information from any public body, simply by emailing them; the public authority is obliged to respond, and there’s a presumption in favour of disclosing information unless it’s covered by a specific exemption. Anthony Barnett, whose organisation Charter 88 campaigned for an FOI Act as part of a wider set of constitutional reforms, has written about its ‘crippling impact on the old regime’. Certainly, those in government came to regret making such a powerful concession. In his memoirs, Tony Blair castigates himself for being a ‘naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop’ for introducing FOI, and considers it one of his greatest mistakes; although he may have been forgetting about something.

Freedom of Information requests are one weapon among a small arsenal of tools and data sources that have proven invaluable for uncovering more about who owns England. I’ll be referring to these investigative tools throughout this book. Some of them were conceded by the government as the intense secrecy of the Cold War dissipated; others have come about through our membership of the EU, or with the development of digital technology; all have been fought for tirelessly by activists, journalists and citizens.

I’ve made extensive use of FOIs in asking public sector bodies to release maps of land and properties they own. Also useful are the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIRs), an EU-derived piece of legislation that gives citizens the right to access specifically environmental information. EIR requests are harder for public bodies to refuse than FOIs, and since 2015 they have also applied to the private water companies, thanks to some great campaigning by an environmental law firm called Fish Legal. I’ve been able to use EIR requests to prise open what land is owned by certain water utilities – though some of them have claimed, bizarrely, that ‘land’ does not count as ‘environmental information’.

It remains harder to find out about private sector land ownership, but here too there has been change for the better. For years, you could only access company accounts at Companies House by paying a fee, making serious investigations prohibitively costly. Then, in 2015, Companies House opened up all its data for free. Its success in providing this excellent resource presents a clear business model for what an open Land Registry should look like.

More recently, Companies House has also started registering ‘Persons of Significant Control’ – the ultimate owners or beneficiaries of registered companies. This is incredibly helpful for investigating complex corporate networks, and disentangling the inevitable knot of subsidiary businesses, shell companies and investments that the parent firms have set up or taken a stake in. For example, the scandal of ground rent properties – homes that have been sold to people on long leases, but which often contain escalating ‘ground rent’ charges hidden in the small print, sometimes making the properties impossible to sell. One of the biggest owners of ground rent properties in England is Wallace Estates. They are owned by the Wallace Partnership Group Ltd, who in turn are owned by Albanwise Ltd. But who owns Albanwise? Thanks to Companies House publishing Persons of Significant Control, we now know: a mysterious Italian billionaire called Count Padulli, who also owns a 4,500-acre estate in Norfolk. His country of residence, however, is stated to be the tax haven of Guernsey.

The increasing trend in recent decades to base companies overseas, and often in offshore tax havens, has presented a fresh challenge to obtaining information on who owns England. Offshore jurisdictions like Guernsey, the British Virgin Islands and Panama aren’t just attractive to companies for reasons of ‘tax efficiency’: they also provide a cloak of secrecy, with less transparent company registries than the UK. If you register a company in the British Virgin Islands, for instance, there is no obligation to reveal the Person of Significant Control who lies behind it.

Anti-corruption charities Global Witness and Transparency International have been pressing for full, public company registers to be implemented in all UK Overseas Territories – including Guernsey and the British Virgin Islands. For years, the government dragged their feet, before being outsmarted by a cross-party group of MPs who forced them to adopt the measures in an amendment to legislation. Even so, the Overseas Territories won’t have to publish any corporate registers until late 2020.

Still, there have been big strides in mapping the land owned by offshore companies. In 2015, Private Eye investigator Christian Eriksson and data journalist Anna Powell-Smith exposed the thousands of acres of land held by offshore firms, using FOI requests and clever mapping to obtain and display the data from the Land Registry.

Long before offshore tax havens were invented, however, the English aristocracy had perfected a system of avoiding taxes and protecting their inheritances: trusts. Many old landed estates are held in trusts, with trustees managing them on behalf of their beneficiaries, such as the heir to the dukedom or barony. This, too, can conceal the identity of the ultimate owners of land. Moreover, there is no public register of trusts. The Tax Justice Network continues to campaign for such a register, to increase transparency and guard against trusts being used for tax evasion.

Clues as to the extent of an estate can be found, though, via a wholly legal tax exemption wheeze sanctioned by HMRC. The government allows some land, buildings and works of art to be exempted from inheritance tax and capital gains tax, providing they are made available for the public to view for a certain period of time each year. In return, the owner of the ‘tax-exempt heritage asset’ must deposit a map with HMRC, alongside details of how members of the public can visit the property. Not everyone who has benefited from the scheme, however, has been so keen to let in the great unwashed. In the 1990s, comedian-turned-activist Mark Thomas discovered that Conservative MP Nicholas Soames was avoiding tax on ‘a lovely three-tier mahogany buffet, with partially reeded slender balustrade upright supports’, but wasn’t letting the public view it. He encouraged hundreds of people to make appointments to see the heirloom at Soames’s estate in Sussex. Eventually, the MP decided to simply pay the tax.

A similar resource exists where landowners have deposited estate maps with the local council to guard against future rights-of-way claims, using provisions in the Highways Act 1980 Section 31(6), as described in the previous chapter. Thousands of these maps lie buried on council websites; still more are likely gathering dust in council office filing cabinets. A few local authorities have had the good sense to fully digitise the maps and make the data available publicly, though many have not.

Many landowners are also the recipients of millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies, in the form of various payment schemes for farming, tree-planting and environmental stewardship. These subsidies derive from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), though the UK government shapes how they’re distributed. The data on farm subsidies can provide important clues as to the ultimate owner of a piece of farmland. Once again, however, this information hasn’t always been public. For years, ministers resisted its release, pressured by landowners’ lobby groups, who feared embarrassing stories would emerge about how much taxpayers’ money their members were receiving. But campaigners at the group FarmSubsidy. org persisted, and eventually the EU ruled that farm payments data had to become transparent. Some of the largest recipients of farm subsidies in recent years have turned out to be billionaire inventor-turned-landowner James Dyson, a Saudi prince who owns large horse-racing studs, and the Queen, for her private estate at Sandringham.

The data on overall farm subsidies now published by the government doesn’t come with maps. That makes it harder to use for locating landowners’ estates. But farm subsidies under the CAP regime come under two ‘pillars’. Pillar 1 payments are essentially a subsidy for owning land, with few other strings attached; they make up two-thirds of the money handed out annually. Pillar 2 payments, on the other hand, are allocated for environmental stewardship. Natural England, the government body that was until recently responsible for handing out Pillar 2 payments, publishes maps of where the schemes operate, together with the recipients. These maps can be very helpful in pinning down who owns the land – although in many cases the recipients are tenant farmers, rather than the ultimate landowners.

Similar maps still exist for a now-defunct payment scheme for woodland management administered by the Forestry Commission, called the English Woodland Grants Scheme. Since estates often maintain control of the forests and hedgerows on their estates even where they have leased the fields to tenant farmers, these maps can prove a surer guide to who really owns the area. With Brexit meaning that a huge shake-up of the UK’s farm subsidy system is now under way, it’s vital that we make future payments to landowners more transparent, rather than going backwards to the era of secret subsidies.

Perhaps the biggest underlying change of the past fifteen years that’s made exploring land ownership easier is the development of digital technologies. Until the 1990s, cartography was mostly still done on paper. Since then, the growth of GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping tools has transformed how maps can be made and shared. An EU directive called INSPIRE has forced the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to publish digital maps showing the outlines of all land parcels in England and Wales – but not who owns them, and with licensing restrictions in place on reproducing the maps. Machine-readable datasets and open-source software have made it easier to analyse complex datasets detailing who owns land, while modern web mapping allows us to create powerful online maps.

The Open Data movement has also sought to shift culture, both within government and wider civil society, so that previously closed data is made open and easily accessible. As Internet pioneer Stewart Brand put it: ‘Information wants to be free.’

All these developments and work-arounds have increased our chances of finding out who owns England. But what of the present state of the Land Registry, set up over 150 years ago now, with the express purpose of gathering such information?

Here, the picture is not so rosy. The Land Registry remains incomplete: over 83 per cent of land in England and Wales has now been registered, but the ‘missing’ 17 per cent comprises millions of acres of land whose owner is unknown. That’s because the rules around registration remain too weak: land is mainly only registered when it changes hands on the open market, and there are of course many old estates which have remained in the hands of the same families for centuries. Worse, 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.

3
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 surrendering its revenues to Parliament. It’s his name that’s recorded as the owner of Sandringham in the 1873 Return of Owners of Land. The current land title for Sandringham states the registered proprietor to be ‘Her most gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second’. But it omits the crucial line, ‘in right of her Crown’, which would make it Crown property. The only other royal residence to be owned personally by the royal family is Balmoral in Scotland, and that was bought by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, before his untimely death. The subsequent Crown Estates Act allowed the royal family to inherit Balmoral and Sandringham as private residences thereafter.

If all that seems oddly arcane and complex, you’re starting to grasp how archaic the British constitution remains. And while this might at first appear an irrelevant quirk of history, the monarchy’s survival continues to shape how power is exercised – and how land is owned. But to understand fully, we need to go further down the rabbit hole.

Our tour of Sandringham passed from the kitsch comfort of the drawing rooms into a darkened corridor, hung with drawings of the royals out hunting and lists of the estate’s gamekeepers. To my surprise, the walls were lined with cabinets stuffed with dozens and dozens of shotguns. ‘This is a .450-bore double-barrelled breach-loading rifle,’ recorded one label, ‘shot by Queen Victoria.’

‘Are any of these used by the Queen currently?’ I asked our tour guide.

‘Aha, no,’ he said. ‘The Queen does occasionally go shooting. But under the Firearms Act, you can’t publicly display weapons which are in current use. Thanks to Magna Carta, not even the Queen is above the law of the land.’

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper, I thought. Sure, the monarchy nowadays is a shadow of what it once was, its powers tightly constrained, its status mostly symbolic. But when it comes to taxation, for instance, the Queen has a very different arrangement to those which bind her subjects. She has only paid income tax voluntarily since 1993. Up to that point, no monarch had paid taxes since the 1930s, a revelation that sparked a public outcry at the time – particularly as ordinary taxpayers had just been asked to foot the bill for repairing Windsor Castle after it had been gutted by fire. Support for republicanism soared during a decade that saw several royal divorces and the death of Diana; although thirty years on from the Queen’s annus horribilis, those still calling for the abolition of the monarchy must feel like they’re ploughing the loneliest of furrows. Two royal weddings, a diamond jubilee and several more grandchildren have helped restore the royal family’s public standing.

The point of this chapter isn’t to persuade you to become a republican. But it is intended to show you how the monarchy continues to shape how power and ownership are exercised in the UK. It seeks to outline why the royals – alongside that other great Establishment survivor, the Church – still own so much land after many centuries of existence. Most of all, it explains how the Crown is partly to blame for why land ownership in England remains so unequal today.

The smart-arse answer to the question ‘who owns England?’ is a simple one: the Crown. All land is ultimately owned by the Crown, and freehold and leasehold titles to land are technically ‘held of the Crown’, and therefore derived from it. The Crown is ‘lord paramount’, with land titles held on its sufferance. If you die without a will, any land you owned reverts to the Crown through the law of bona vacantia.

In practice, owning a freehold in land nowadays means you can do pretty well what you like with it. No marauding monarch is going to come and take it from you. But that hasn’t always been the case.

It was William the Conqueror who declared that all land in England belonged ultimately to the Crown, straight after the Norman Conquest of 1066. At William’s instigation, titles in land henceforth would be derived from the Crown. The king sat at the top of this feudal pyramid, and the whole country was now his to carve up as he pleased: a giant cake to be cut into slices and handed out to his cronies.

It’s this that lies at the heart of why land ownership remains so concentrated and unequal in England today. William the Conqueror’s land grab and system of patronage set the stage for the following thousand years. The king parcelled out land to a small coterie of barons, whose families would continue to inherit such lands for centuries afterwards. By dealing out the pack of cards so unfairly, William skewed the game from the outset. A large part of the blame for the resulting pattern of land ownership has to be levelled squarely at the Crown.

‘The public do a very good job of mentally separating the Royal Family from the rest of the aristocracy, but that is not the reality,’ admitted one peer with remarkable honesty during a House of Lords debate in 2013. ‘The Royal Family is the core of the aristocratic system.’ As Andy Wightman argues, ‘Private landownership in Scotland remains a small, inter-related and privileged club which is proud to have the Queen as a member.’ The same could be said of England.

Of course, William the Conqueror didn’t claim ownership of the whole of England only to immediately hand it out again to his barons. He also kept a very large chunk of land for the Crown itself. According to records in the Domesday Book, the king and his family owned around 17 per cent of England in 1086 – perhaps some 5.4 million acres. Nearly a thousand years later, the Crown in its various institutional guises still owns around a million acres of land in England and Wales, or half a million acres if you exclude the areas comprising foreshore and riverbeds. Looked at from one perspective, that represents a major loss of land over time. But from another angle, it’s an incredible tale of territorial survival. How have the fortunes of this vast estate changed over time, and how has it managed to survive into the twenty-first century?

If anything, the extent of Crown lands increased in size for a couple of centuries after the Norman Conquest. In particular, the Norman kings acquired lots of land to indulge their love of hunting. Another of William’s innovations, besides feudalism, was forest law. Nowadays we think of a forest as being composed of trees, a large woodland. But ‘forest’ is actually a legal construct – a term given to an area of land, whether wooded or not, where hunting privileges were restricted to the king. William and his successors established vast royal forests, including the New Forest and the Forest of Dean, where the hunting of deer and boar was outlawed for anyone save the king and his favoured courtiers.

Since English common law had created a customary right for hungry commoners to feed themselves by hunting wild game, this was a frightening new encroachment on the rights of ordinary people, in a kingdom already straining under the Norman yoke. Punishment for poaching in royal forests was severe. The Rime of King William, a furious poem written a year after William’s death by a disgruntled courtier, records that the king ‘established many deer preserves, / and he set up many laws concerning them, / such that whoever killed a hart or a hind / should be blinded.’

By the time of Henry II’s reign (1154–89), it’s reckoned that royal forests covered somewhere between a quarter and a third of all England – a vast area of land subjugated to the private pleasures of one individual at the expense of the public. Royal forests weren’t all strictly owned by the Crown – some were established on land belonging to other landowners – but the constraints and privileges enacted by forest law were so stringent that the Crown might as well have owned the land outright.

The royal penchant for game also inspired many barons to set up their own deer parks and hunting grounds. The thrill of the hunt is still recorded today in place names like Cannock Chase or Cranborne Chase, where nobles took their cue from the king in applying the principles of the royal forest to their own lands. Just as the Crown’s division of the spoils of conquest had established a landowning elite, so its act of closing off previously public lands for private gain set a dangerous precedent. In centuries to come, the aristocracy and gentry would begin the process of enclosure, stealing land once held in common and converting it into farmland for private profit.

But the Crown’s land grabs didn’t go unchallenged. Everyone today has heard of Magna Carta, the contract forced upon the Crown in 1215 by barons fed up with a despotic monarch. Most people have forgotten, however, about the Charter of the Forest, the ‘poor man’s Magna Carta’ which simultaneously pressed the Crown to respect rights customarily held by commoners.

As the historian Peter Linebaugh recounts, ‘There were two charters forced on King John at Runnymede. Beside the great charter with which we are all vaguely familiar, there was a second charter in 1217 known as the Charter of the Forest. Whereas the first charter concerned, for the most part, political and juridical rights, the second charter dealt with economic survival.’ The Charter ordered that ‘all woods made forest … shall be immediately disafforested’ – which is to say, removed from royal jurisdiction. The rights of commoners to the fruits of the earth – rights which were later to be savagely abused by the aristocracy – were accepted and codified by the Crown. Thereafter, royal rorests and forest law started to shrink in extent and influence. Edward III ‘disafforested’ the whole of Surrey in 1327, and by 1350 only 15 per cent of England lay under forest laws.

The decline of the royal forests didn’t end the Crown’s love affair with hunting, of course. Fashions simply evolved as nature’s larder was depleted. The last wild boar in England was killed in the seventeenth century. The Hanoverian kings had more of a taste for landscape gardening and hobby-farming, particularly George III, who earned the nickname ‘Farmer George’. But under Queen Victoria, the Crown’s sponsorship of bloodsports revived in a big way – only this time, the fashion was to buy a keepered grouse moor and blast away at birds with a shotgun. Today, the Queen owns a huge grouse moor estate around Balmoral and another in the North York Moors via the Duchy of Lancaster, as well as hosting pheasant shoots at Sandringham. Once again, the Crown has acted as a trendsetter in the ownership and misuse of land, shaping aristocratic tastes and causing hundreds of thousands of acres of upland England and Scotland to be converted into sporting estates.

Between the Black Death and the Civil War, the story of the Crown lands – as much as is known about them – seems to be one of financial mismanagement and decline. For a time, the monarchy’s landed estates had provided adequate income for the royal household to live within its means. But fighting endless foreign wars of aggression, from the Crusades to the Hundred Years War, proved expensive; and soon kings were summoning their barons to plead for more cash. Parliament, the setting for such negotiations, at first delivered the goods – even when it proved ruinous. The levying of the vastly unfair Poll Tax in 1381 sparked a colossal revolt by peasants and labourers that threatened to topple feudalism in its entirety. The revolt was quashed and the landowning order maintained. But increasingly, even landowner-dominated Parliaments came to view the excesses of the Crown with disdain.

Throughout this period, successive kings and queens flogged off and gave away Crown lands with scant thought for the longer term. With the exception of the two duchies – which we’ll turn to later – the monarchy’s lands were frittered away, handed out to favourites at court rather than managed to maximise incomes. Most profligate of all were the Stuart dynasty, whose thirst for cash resulted in the selling off of land, the creation of new peerages, demands for higher taxes and then, when MPs refused to levy them, the dissolution of Parliament. In fact, the Stuart kings cocked up their finances so badly, it led to civil war and Parliament’s execution of Charles I.

For eleven years, England had no Crown. Determined to run things more efficiently, Cromwell’s Parliaments carried out an extensive survey of Crown lands. But rather than keep hold of them as an ongoing source of revenue for the nation’s finances, they too decided to sell them off. The reason was simple: Cromwell’s army was massively in arrears, and its unpaid footsoldiers were getting restless. The Crown lands were sold for about £250 million in today’s money, going some way towards settling Parliament’s civil war debts. Many of the buyers were existing landed gentry; others belonged to Cromwell’s officer class. They didn’t get to enjoy their new possessions for long, however: the collapse of the Republic and restoration of the monarchy in 1660 led to the immediate return of all lands to the Crown.

The restored monarchy soon found its freedom to manoeuvre hemmed in by constitutional restraints put in place by a Parliament determined never to have to go to war with the Crown again. When the Stuarts once more proved too big for their boots, MPs invited first the Dutch and then the Germans to come and have a go at wearing the crown. The Hanoverian dynasty proved much more compliant with the wishes of Parliament. In 1760, George III agreed to give up the income from his Crown lands in exchange for an annual stipend called the Civil List. The lands would still technically be his, ‘in right of his Crown’, but the revenues would flow to the Treasury and they would be managed by an organisation answerable to Parliament – later called the Crown Estate.

It was a sweet deal for the king, as the Crown lands were in a pretty shambolic state at the time. Revenues remained low, and land holdings had continued to be filched for bribes and the enrichment of court favourites. The Civil List, by contrast, handed the royal family a guaranteed fixed income. And over the next century, the Crown Estate’s fortunes were to revive. Staffed with an increasingly professional civil service, its holding of land doubled in size from around 106,000 acres to 220,000 acres over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign. More importantly from the government’s perspective, revenues grew immensely, bringing in millions of pounds for the public purse. The development of London made some Crown lands stupendously valuable – such as Regent Street, built to link the Prince Regent’s mansion on Pall Mall with Regent’s Park in the north. And when it was forced to hand over the remaining royal forests to the Forestry Commission in 1924, the Crown Estate quickly made up the lost acreage by investing in farmland instead.

Over the last century, the Crown Estate has become a fully commercial institution, managing its enviable property portfolio with ruthless efficiency. Its holdings have expanded still further to cover 336,000 acres of England and Wales, with huge tracts of prime farmland in Lincolnshire and the Fens, on Romney Marsh, and along the Holderness shore. Comparing maps of what the Crown Estate owns with agricultural land classification maps, you can see that nearly all of its farms are on top-quality Grade 1 and 2 farmland. It also benefited from receiving £366,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies in 2016.

Still, nowadays, there’s much more money to be made from Apple iPhones than from apples. The Crown Estate gets more rental income from Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street than it does from its entire agricultural estate. And though it still bears responsibility for managing the Crown’s traditional stamping grounds – Windsor Great Park, for instance – its modern capitalist instincts mean it always has an eye out for new ways to boost its earnings. Where the Crown’s landed interests once lay in castles and deer parks, the Crown Estate now prioritises investment in shopping centres and retail parks. That may sound like a moan about creeping commercialisation, but frankly, I’d rather the Crown generate proceeds for the public purse than, say, own a forest for a monarch’s exclusive right to hunt boar. The Crown Estate’s ownership of the UK seabed has also made it a champion for renewable energy and addressing climate change: what was once an effectively worthless asset has become highly lucrative with the UK’s development of offshore wind, which the Estate now has a vested interest in promoting.[fn1]

The Crown Estate’s motto, ‘brilliant places through conscious commercialism’, may be a rather nauseating PR slogan, but its contribution to the Exchequer’s coffers nowadays is considerable: £329 million in 2017. Subject to Freedom of Information law and with its finances fully open for public scrutiny, the modern Crown Estate’s professionalism is a world away from the sloppy venality with which the Crown’s lands were managed for many centuries. Still, its transformation into a corporate property agent has its pitfalls: some of the properties it looks after risk succumbing to the overriding imperative for high returns. The Laxton Estate, for instance – the last example of a medieval open field system in England, which has been owned by the Crown Estate since 1981 – was earmarked for sale in early 2018 because it doesn’t turn enough of a profit.

Then there’s the matter of the reorganisation of the royals’ finances in 2012, when the then Chancellor, George Osborne, ended the Civil List and replaced it with a new Sovereign Grant. This new system re-established the link between the health of the Crown Estate and what the royal family receives in income. Now its annual funding is 15 per cent of Crown Estate revenues – so if the Estate posts higher turnover, the Queen and her family get more money. In fact, during the most recent review of the grant, MPs voted to increase the index to 25 per cent of revenues for the next decade, to cover repair works to Buckingham Palace. Not everyone was happy, understandably: as the Labour MP Alex Cunningham pointed out, ‘I have always respected the fact that we have a royal family, but I know they also have vast wealth and I don’t know what sort of contributions they will be making towards this project.’

Because the Crown’s wealth doesn’t actually stop with the Crown Estate. There’s also the small matter of the other two property empires it owns: the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster.

Down a side alley off the Strand, behind the Savoy Hotel, with its cucumber sandwiches and champagne and top-hatted doorman, is an ancient church. This is the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy, and it harbours a well-kept secret. It lies at the heart of the Duchy of Lancaster, one of the oldest property empires in England, and a little-known moneyspinner for the monarchy.

When I visited it, the cool air of the chapel was a welcome relief from the sticky heatwave that had been slow-roasting London. Stepping into the sepulchral gloom, I felt the urge to tiptoe: though only yards from one of the capital’s busiest shopping districts, the building’s thick stone walls muffled all external sound. Blue satin cushions covered empty pews upon a chequerboard floor. Every surface seemed suffused with heraldry. Armorial plates plastered the wood-panelled walls, the coats-of-arms of bygone Knights Commander and Grand Masters of this or that Order. Translucent lions and crosses shone from the stained glass windows; above the altar, one gothic arch framed a depiction of the Holy Grail. It was all very Dan Brown.

Except here, the secret societies and ancient bloodlines are all real. The Savoy Chapel is not only the Queen’s personal place of worship, complete with regal throne at the back of the nave. It’s also the church for the Royal Victorian Order – an obscure, dynastic order of knighthood that rewards personal service to the monarch. More portentous still are the names that adorn the vaulted ceiling. Commemorated in azure and gold is the royal lineage of the Lancastrians, stretching back to one of the most Machiavellian and capricious bastards in English history: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and founder of the Duchy. The chapel is built from the rubble of his luxurious mansion, the Savoy Palace.

Gaunt was the power behind the throne of his teenage nephew, Richard II: the archetypal evil uncle and scheming Grand Vizier par excellence. He was also stupendously rich, the largest landowner in England, with vast estates in every county. In 1381, Gaunt was up north hammering the Scots when the Poll Tax rebellions erupted in Kent and Essex. Peasants and townsfolk alike marched upon London, demanding that the king’s evil advisers should be hanged – Gaunt chief among them. When the young king refused to hand them over, anarchy ensued. The rebels descended upon the Savoy Palace and began systematically dismantling the wealth of their feudal masters. Tapestries were wrenched off walls, furniture thrown out of windows, and a vast bonfire made of Gaunt’s riches. Rather than engage in looting and be written off as mere thieves, the rebels instead opted to smash up the tyrant’s vast stash of gold plate so it couldn’t be reconstituted. The Savoy – which had cost £35,000 to build, a third of the estimated annual wage bill for the entire English army – was ground to dust.

But Gaunt’s ducal lands remained intact. After defeating the Peasants’ Revolt, Gaunt was determined to see the House of Lancaster prosper for ever. So when his son, Henry Bolingbroke, murdered Richard II and usurped the throne, his first act was to declare the Duchy to be his and his male heirs’ estate for ever more, held separately from other Crown lands. The Duchy of Lancaster has remained the monarchy’s personal fiefdom ever since.

Today it runs to 45,674 acres, including five ‘rural surveys’, which span grouse moors in north Lancashire, moorland in North Yorkshire, dozens of farms near Burton-upon-Trent, and entire villages in Cheshire. In addition, it owns the foreshore along most of the Lancashire coastline, and extensive mineral rights, including valuable gypsum mines. Looking through the Duchy’s entries in Land Registry data, the estate’s ancient hold over certain areas comes through clearly in the place names: Duchy House, Savoy Road, Lancaster Farm. The Duchy’s Savoy Estate in central London, though tiny in extent, rakes in rents from retail, as well as hosting the estate’s headquarters at Lancaster House, just around the corner from the Chapel of the Savoy.

The affairs of the Duchy of Lancaster remain cloaked in mystery. Until recently, anyone wishing to look into what the Duchy currently owns had to make do with one grainy map on its website. That’s changed with the Land Registry’s recent release of more data on land owned by companies and corporate bodies. But in every other way, the Duchy of Lancaster seems to have deflected public attention from its affairs. It’s not subject to scrutiny by the National Audit Office, Parliament’s financial watchdog. It produces an annual report to Parliament and a Cabinet minister serves as Chancellor of the Duchy, a mostly symbolic role; yet the Duchy has avoided being made subject to Freedom of Information requests from the public. Nor does it pay corporation tax (although the Queen voluntarily pays tax on any income). The Duchy claims that it ‘does not receive any public funds in connection with its activities’, yet it received almost £38,000 in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies in 2016.

The Duchy is an unreformed anachronism, which owes its survival to the accretions of royal privilege over the centuries. But this archaic body continues to benefit from the modern surge in land and property prices. In 2018, the Duchy of Lancaster posted a £20 million profit – three and a half times larger than what it generated back in the year 2000, and on top of the £76 million received by the royal household thanks to the Sovereign Grant. It seems crazy that we continue to tolerate this set-up, meekly allowing the monarchy to keep a medieval cash cow with minimal oversight and exempt from the tax levied on other businesses. ‘Why are we throwing millions of pounds at the Queen,’ asks Graham Smith of campaign group Republic, ‘when that money could be spent on schools, hospitals and local communities?’ Why indeed?

A similar story can be told about the Duchy of Cornwall. It, too, was created in the 1300s, as the personal dukedom of the heir to the throne. Its lands were first gifted to Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, and today the Duchy belongs to Prince Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall.

Like its sister body, the Duchy of Cornwall is one of the strangest beasts in England’s still quasi-feudal political economy. It’s not a company, and so doesn’t pay corporation tax. It’s neither a charity nor a public body – and it isn’t subject to formal parliamentary scrutiny or Freedom of Information requests, though it has to gain permission from the Treasury if it wants to sell off land. The Duchy has even successfully fought off attempts to make it subject to public requests made under the Environmental Information Regulations – something that sits uneasily alongside the Prince’s environmental credentials – in a bizarre case involving its ancient ownership of the Fal estuary and its right to allow oyster dredging over it. It is, in short, an anachronism – but one that has survived for nearly seven hundred years and continues to grow in size.

But try to investigate what the Duchy of Cornwall owns, and you’ll find it’s an even more opaque institution than the Duchy of Lancaster. Its annual reports give a flavour of the properties it possesses, but little by way of detail. The Land Registry, despite releasing data on properties owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, has decided to exclude the Duchy of Cornwall from its Corporate and Commercial dataset – seemingly because it’s considered to be the personal estate of one individual, the Duke of Cornwall.

I bought the land title to one of the Duchy’s properties, to check out exactly who it was registered to. You need to take a deep breath before reading out the name of the registered proprietor: it’s ‘His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Chester and Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland’.

Welcome to twenty-first-century Britain, I thought. When I cheerfully emailed the Duchy asking for a map of what they owned, reply came there none. Well, it’s always worth a try. But then, concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it.

I had more luck leafing through back editions of National Geographic at my grandma’s house in Cornwall. There, in a feature on the Duchy written back in 2006, was a map showing the outline of its major possessions. That was my starting point for investigating further.

The Duchy does not, contrary to popular belief, own the whole of Cornwall – though it does possess nearly 19,000 acres of it. Its ancient manorial lands encompass the medieval castles of Tintagel, Launceston, Trematon and Restormel; prehistoric stone circles on Bodmin Moor; steep wooded valleys near Herodsfoot and Stoke Climsland; and dozens of idyllic mixed farms, their sunken lanes and high hedgerows as Cornish as clotted cream.

Yet though Cornwall is the heart of the Duchy, its landholdings are spread far and wide. Its biggest possession by far is a 70,000-acre slice of Dartmoor in Devon – most of it leased out to the Ministry of Defence for army training. Further afield, the Prince of Wales has his private home and gardens at Highgrove Farm in Gloucestershire. Some acquisitions are ancient: the Iron Age hill forts of Maiden Castle in Dorset and Ham Hill in Somerset, or the Manor of Inglescombe to the west of Bath. Some are more recent: the Duchy bought the 11,000-acre Guy’s Estate in Herefordshire from the insurance company Prudential in 2000.

Nor is it all bucolic farming. Prince Charles has always expressed strong views on architecture, ever since decrying a proposed modernist extension to the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’. Much of the public shares the Prince’s taste for old-fashioned classical designs; the difference is that he has the land and money to put such ideas into practice.

Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, is the Prince’s answer to building homes that people want to live in – lots of red brick, green open spaces and plenty of Farrow and Ball paintwork. It’s certainly pleasant and well-designed, but perhaps just a little too perfect, like something out of Noddy or Trumpton. Elsewhere, the Duchy’s properties include housing estates in Kennington – with clues as to the landlord contained in street names like Black Prince Road, and a nearby pub called the Prince of Wales – and the crown jewels of the Oval Cricket Ground. Still, the Duchy owns a few carbuncles of its own: a Holiday Inn in Reading, a Waitrose distribution centre in Milton Keynes and a quarry in Gloucestershire all number among its possessions.

All told, the Duchy today owns around 130,000 acres of land across England and Wales, nearly twice as much as it did in the Victorian period. This alone is enough to make the Prince of Wales the single largest private landowner in England – even without the additional 100,000 acres of foreshore, 14,000 acres of estuaries and riverbeds, and extensive mineral rights that the Duchy also lays claim to.

By all accounts, the Prince is a well-respected landowner, who’s taken a prescient interest in climate change and other environmental issues, and put his money where his mouth is when it comes to long-term estate management. But it’s important to distinguish Prince Charles as a person from the Duchy as an institution, just as with Queen Elizabeth and her Duchy of Lancaster.

Both duchies are medieval anachronisms, whose attempts to dodge corporation tax and avoid being subjected to public sector norms of financial accountability and transparency are, essentially, tedious attempts to preserve feudal privilege. The lands owned by the duchies were acquired through the same mix of conquest and confiscation as all the other Crown lands: and yet, where most of these lands today are vested in the Crown Estate, with their revenues flowing into the public purse, the duchies remain private piggy banks for the monarch and heir to the throne. Let’s not forget that the Sovereign Grant handed the royal family £76 million in 2017: the duchies brought in £41.9 million on top of this – not to mention the £695,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies handed to the Queen for her Sandringham Estate. And while the Queen and Prince of Wales voluntarily pay income tax on these earnings, future monarchs could readily seek to waive such an arrangement. This is the enduring problem of our uncodified constitution: it’s ripe for abuse by changes in personnel. After all, the Prince might respect the traditions of estate management, but he’s broken the royal convention of not engaging in political lobbying on multiple occasions, as was revealed with the publication of his infamous ‘black spider letters’ to ministers.

Surely the time has come for the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall to be abolished, and their lands merged with those of the Crown Estate. The Crown Estate has proved itself to be an exceptionally able manager, generating huge profits while being open to scrutiny and mindful of the long term; so why should it not administer the Duchy lands, too? Their revenues would then flow directly to the public purse. MPs could then decide whether to vote for a corresponding increase in the Sovereign Grant – or whether the extra money would be better spent elsewhere, on things like schools and the NHS. The Duchies, being past masters at surviving, would of course put up a fight. Feudalism dies hard: John of Gaunt would be turning in his grave. But there really is no place for it in the modern world.

Before we move on from the Crown, there’s just one issue left: the surprisingly vexed question of who owns the royal palaces and parks. ‘We all know who owns Buckingham Palace,’ states a recent article in Time magazine. But do we? The Daily Express, admittedly never the most reliable of sources when it comes to the royals, blithely asserts that it’s ‘owned by the Crown Estate’. But it isn’t: their asset maps omit both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

In fact, both royal residences are under the management of the Royal Household Property Section, yet another part of the Crown’s byzantine structure. It, too, hasn’t changed much over the years. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica stated drily that ‘in its main outlines the existing organization of the royal household is essentially the same as it was under the Tudors or the Plantagenets.’ Aficionados of Netflix’s The Crown will be familiar with the hidebound traditions of the Royal Household’s management, customs that no doubt irk even the Queen at times. But it might be more accurate to say that no one owns Buckingham Palace – or at least, no one has actually registered ownership of it. I bought the Land Registry records to check: there’s no registered proprietor – only a caution from the Crown Estate Commissioners saying that the Queen is ‘interested in the land as beneficial owner’.

Who owns Hyde Park, Regent’s Park and the rest of London’s royal parks is an easier question to answer: it’s a charity that’s grown out of what used to be a government quango. The same is true for the royal residences that are no longer occupied by the royal family – which in England consist of the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, the Banqueting Hall on Whitehall, and Kew Palace. They’re owned and managed by Historic Royal Palaces, a charity that’s taken on functions previously carried out by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In both cases, what was previously private splendour – enclosed deer parks and palatial homesteads – has now rightly been opened up for public enjoyment.

But strangest of all, and certainly most revealing about where sovereignty really lies under our archaic constitution, is the ownership of Parliament. Few people remember today that Parliament was once a royal residence: the Palace of Westminster. It occupies the site next to the tidal Thames where the Danish King Canute once demonstrated to his courtiers the limits of his regal powers by failing to hold back the waves. Canute built his palace on what was then the low-lying Thorney Island; Parliament was still succumbing to floods as recently as 1928.

For centuries, there has been a longstanding convention that no monarch is allowed to enter the House of Commons. At the annual State Opening of Parliament, the Queen sends her emissary Black Rod to knock three times on the door of the Commons, to summon MPs to hear her speech. But the door is slammed shut in his face, symbolising the Commons’ independence. This crucial limitation of the monarch’s remit dates back to the Civil War. As political theatre, it represents Parliament’s subsequent armed rebellion, its execution of the king and imposition of a republic, and its later shaping of a constitutional monarchy. In short, it’s an assertion of Parliamentary sovereignty. And yet, it appears that the Queen still quietly asserts her claim to own Parliament.

I discovered this when I chanced across an old parliamentary debate from the Swinging Sixties. The Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, having just swept to power on a modernising mission to unleash the ‘white heat of technology’ and update Britain’s tired old institutions, made a special announcement to Parliament in March 1965. The Queen, he declared, had ‘graciously agreed that the control, use and occupation of the Palace of Westminster and its precincts shall be permanently enjoyed by the Houses of Parliament’. Control of the building would pass to the Speaker. Wilson’s Cabinet colleague Tony Benn must have been pleased: as a diehard republican, he had refused to kiss the Queen’s hand when he joined the Privy Council.

Intrigued, I decided to take a look at the Land Registry records for the Houses of Parliament – expecting to find the freehold registered to the Speaker.[fn2] But it wasn’t. Instead, there was simply a recent caution, similar to that for Buckingham Palace, lodged by the Crown Estate Commissioners, that ‘the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty is interested in the land as beneficial owner … in right of Her Crown’. Wilson, it seemed, hadn’t taken back control at all.

The confusion over who owns Parliament illustrates a broader truth about the muddle of British politics, and how interwoven our modern system of government is with the ancient institution of the Crown. The Crown’s formal powers may have withered, but its symbolic soft power remains strong – and its landed wealth is still extensive. Grappling with the archaic customs of the Crown remains essential to understanding land ownership in England today. Who owns the land on which the House of Commons meets is only a small, perhaps trifling part of that. But symbolism matters in politics. Brexit, we are told, is all about reclaiming parliamentary sovereignty. If that’s to be the case, why doesn’t Parliament first take back control of the land beneath its feet?

If the story of the Crown has been one of territorial survival, the tale of what’s happened to the Church’s lands is one of almost complete collapse. Once the country’s largest and wealthiest landowner, the Church today is a shadow of its former glory. But what’s most surprising is how recently its possessions were lost. Even in the late Victorian period, the Church was the largest single landowner in England. Yet over the past century, it has lost around 90 per cent of its lands. Why? The mystery of who stole the Church’s land is a whodunnit worthy of a Brother Cadfael novel.

The medieval Church enjoyed vast wealth. Domesday suggests that bishops and abbots owned over a quarter of the entire kingdom, around 8.3 million acres. By the Reformation, historians’ best estimates are that Church lands had declined somewhat, to around 4 million acres. But this was still a colossal area, and it brought in great riches in the form of tithes, rents and agricultural produce. Large areas of England had been settled by the monastic orders, who set to work on draining marshy ground and putting wilderness under the plough. The ordained clergy of priests and bishops also owned plenty of land, not to mention churches and outbuildings. Of course, some of this worldly wealth was reinvested by the Church into building ever-larger cathedrals, and redistributed to the poor in the form of alms. But the senior ranks of the Church seldom went hungry. Over the centuries, various nonconformist and heretical sects – from the Friars and mendicant orders to the Cathars, Lollards and Protestant puritans – poured scorn on the gilded wealth of the Church hierarchy, seeing it as a corruption of the holy poverty of true Christianity.

Henry VIII’s decision in 1536 to dissolve the monasteries and seize their lands had no such spiritual motivation. Part and parcel of Henry’s break from Rome, it was also a land grab pure and simple, to bolster royal finances and fund foreign wars. A large chunk of the land that Henry took from the monasteries was quickly sold off or handed out to noble cronies. The Russell family, for example – later the Dukes of Bedford – were given the old monastic lands of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. It’s still their family seat today. For centuries afterwards, the beneficiaries of Henry’s land grab would remain staunch defenders of the Anglican settlement – terrified of losing their possessions should the Catholic Church ever be restored. One of the main reasons why Bonnie Prince Charlie – the Catholic pretender to the throne in the eighteenth century – never succeeded in becoming king was because of the aristocracy’s fear of losing their ‘Abbey Lands’ if he took power.

But the newly created Church of England was hardly poor, either. Only the monasteries had been dissolved; the old bishoprics kept their lands, and the Anglican Church started out with an endowment of land that ensured it would remain very rich. By the time of the 1873 Return of Owners of Land, the Church still owned a vast estate of 2.13 million acres, making it the single largest landowner in England at the time.

Most of this was in the form of land known as ‘glebe’ – land set aside for the upkeep of parish priests, the lowest and poorest rung of the Anglican clergy. It comprises the land on which vicarages and rectories are built, but also farmland to supplement vicars’ incomes. From the Reformation until the twentieth century, parish priests had three main sources of income: fees from performing baptisms, marriages and deaths; tithes, a form of Church taxation levied on other local landowners and farmers; and glebe land. Glebe could be farmed by the parish priest himself, or rented out to tenants.

Equipped with this huge land bank, and bolstered by the Victorian surge in Christian piety, the Church could feel very secure. Its spiritual grip on the nation was matched by its earthly wealth. But then, over the next century, a quiet catastrophe appears to have overwhelmed the Church’s landholdings.

In 1976, a new law, the Endowments and Glebe Measure, centralised the ownership of glebe land, transferring it from parish priests to the Diocesan Boards of Finance that administer to the Church of England’s forty-one bishoprics. The law passed without comment at the time. But what emerged much later, thanks to the careful investigations of historian Kevin Cahill and the MP Adrian Sanders, was that 90 per cent of all glebe land had disappeared over the intervening century. Only after a Parliamentary Question was lodged by Sanders in 2002 were the stats released. Having been masters of over 2 million acres in 1873, the Church’s glebe lands in 1976 amounted to a pitiable 111,628 acres.

Where had all the Church’s land gone? The Church themselves were to prove exceptionally coy about the matter. For years, the subject has remained shrouded in mystery, with the Diocesan Boards of Finance often refusing to answer questions about it. Cahill wrote to every diocese requesting an explanation, but received useful information from less than half. Efforts by Exeter University to investigate the matter in 2012 drew a blank after a ‘very disappointing’ response rate from Church authorities. The Church is not subject to Freedom of Information laws, even though the C of E is England’s established religion and twenty-six bishops sit in the House of Lords making the laws that govern us. But uncovering what the Church still owns today has proved fiendishly difficult, until now.

The Land Registry’s release of land ownership information on companies and corporate bodies in recent years means an updated stocktake of the state of Church lands is now possible, and it’s even worse than before. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to the Land Registry by Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson elicited figures for the area of land owned by corporate bodies, including each of the Diocesan Boards of Finance. I’ve checked these figures against the stats on glebe land that a quarter of all dioceses now publish on their websites: in nine out of ten cases, the figures match up well. So, unless there’s a backlog of land out there that remains unregistered, we can pretty confidently say that the amount of glebe land has decreased still further over the past four decades. Just 70,000 acres remain. The slide has been universal: landholdings in Lincolnshire, for example, consistently at the top of the league, declined from nearly 100,000 acres of glebe in Victorian time to 20,000 in 1976; there are now just 12,000 acres left.

The reason why has more to do with the lure of Mammon than with holy scripture. Before the 1976 law change, individual parish priests had the option of selling off their glebe land, alongside simply renting it out, as a way to make some extra cash. We can’t be sure, given the Church’s silence on the matter, but it seems that many vicars chose to make a quick buck by flogging off the land. After all, faced with the government’s abolition of tithes in 1936 (which took place as a result of rural workers’ and landowners’ campaigns in the wake of the Great Depression), and with dwindling church congregations in an increasingly secular society, some parishes must have felt the need to sell off their assets to make ends meet.

‘Stealing land is difficult to do,’ muses the land rights activist Gill Barron, who’s also looked into the loss of glebe land. ‘You can’t exactly roll it up in a carpet and carry it away. But … the undercover transfer of ownership of land is, in fact, incredibly easy in a country where the records of who owns what are a jealously guarded secret.’ And the Church has certainly helped keep the secret closely guarded.

Wresting control of glebe land away from vicars and handing it to dioceses was a belated attempt by the C of E hierarchy to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted. Yet the financial impetus to sell up has clearly remained – hence the continued decline in glebe since the 1970s. ‘Because of its original purpose, glebe land is usually situated within a settlement or close on the outskirts of the settlement, with a high chance of it being zoned for development,’ write the estate agents Savills. This, they state, ‘can make the land very valuable’.

You’ll probably have walked past a Glebe Close or Glebe Field near where you live: in some cases, the Church may retain ownership, but usually the site will have been sold on long ago for development. Some of this former glebe land even appears to have found its way into the hands of offshore companies based in tax havens. For example, Land Registry data lists land at Glebe Farm in Ruislip, West London, as now belonging to Blackfriars Holdings Ltd, based in the British Virgin Islands; while Glebe House in Bedford belongs to Glebe Ltd, registered in the Channel Islands. There are dozens more such examples, and likely countless other glebe fields that have been sold for shopping malls or buried beneath roads.

The loss of glebe lands tells us two things. First, it confirms the great cloak of secrecy that continues to envelop land ownership in England, and how our established institutions continue to promote this – in the case of the Church, perhaps out of embarrassment for what full transparency would reveal.

Second, it’s an early case study in the financialisation of land. The Church’s sale of glebe lands anticipated the great privatisation of public land later enacted by Margaret Thatcher’s government and her successors. In doing so, however, the Church wasn’t embarking on some ideological plan; rather, it simply succumbed to that oldest of sins, human greed.

Despite having allowed its clergy to sell off so much of the family silver, the Church today still boasts a property portfolio worth at least £8 billion. Its finances have been kept afloat by the Church Commissioners, a central body set up in 1948 to manage the Church’s property assets. The Church Commissioners own land totalling around 105,000 acres, on top of what the dioceses own – and in 2017 this land generated a whopping £226 million of income for the Church.

What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’

Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years. But such business acumen has seen them take up the mantle of property developers, and sell off affordable residential housing in favour of more lucrative commercial developments.

‘The pressure to generate the investment income needed by the Church of England,’ argues housing expert Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, ‘has led to an increasingly commercial attitude towards their land and property investments.’ Although the Commissioners, he maintains, ‘retain a small residual social commitment to “housing the poor”’, their properties have ‘increasingly come to be viewed as an investment like any other’.

Back when the Church Commissioners were established after the Second World War, the Church had some 60,000 residential properties on its books. Much of its housing stock was of poor quality; some of its London estates around Paddington were even described as slums. But rather than redevelop its properties to provide better-quality accommodation for working-class residents, the Commissioners, finding they generated low profit margins, simply sold off vast swathes of housing. Ninety acres south-east of Paddington were retained and gentrified; house prices there today are an astonishing £11,000 per square metre. The Bishop’s Avenue, just north of Hampstead Heath, was put on the market by the Church in 1959: today, it’s a byword for empty mansions and offshore billionaires. By the 1970s, the Commissioners retained just a tenth of the housing stock they had first inherited.

To fund the upkeep of the clergy and their ageing buildings – like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Palace on the banks of the Thames – would take more than the usual church roof fund appeals, the Commissioners decided. This hard-nosed approach saw them diversify the Church’s asset portfolio into stocks and shares, and invest instead in commercial property. From the 1950s onwards, they embarked on a string of multi-million-pound redevelopment projects, using their valuable freehold land to build the Angel Centre in Islington, a shopping mall in Birkenhead, and office blocks on the Cartwright Estate near Tottenham Court Road, among other ventures.

Perhaps the biggest moneyspinner of all, however, was the rebuilding of Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s – Church land since medieval times, whose name comes from the Latin for ‘Our Father’, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. In 1986, with the City of London booming in the wake of financial deregulation by Margaret Thatcher’s government, the Church Commissioners sold a 250-year lease on the land to a consortium of property developers. The deal was worth tens of millions to the Church, who also retained the valuable freehold. Goldman Sachs and the London Stock Exchange would later take up residence in Paternoster Square, transforming it from a place where monks once clutched their rosaries into a temple to modern capitalism.

But it wouldn’t be long before the square was filled with the sound of chickens coming home to roost. In the wake of the financial crash of 2008 – the inevitable consequence of City deregulation – Paternoster Square was where the Occupy movement of 2011 first tried to set up camp, before being forced to settle on the steps of St Paul’s. The resulting showdown with the Church authorities saw much soul-searching among the clergy over the Church’s accommodation with capitalism. The Canon of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser, who resigned out of sympathy with the protesters, spoke about the ‘very legitimate anger about the way in which wealth has been distributed and the way in which capitalism is currently seen to benefit just a very few people’. Ownership of land and property, of course, remains central to this chasm of inequality.

To be fair to them, the Church Commissioners have always aspired to wealth redistribution – it’s just that their remit is to redistribute income between the clergy, rather than among society at large. One example is the fact that the Commissioners today own lots of land and property in County Durham and around Newcastle, stretching from the mouth of the Tyne all the way back to the foothills of the North Pennines. The reason is that the area had once been owned by the local bishop as part of the Palatinate of Durham, an ancient institution where the Church held huge sway outside the jurisdiction even of the Crown. For centuries, the bishop of Durham had been the region’s largest and richest landowner. Much of this land was later taken over by the Church Commissioners as part of their efforts to even out some of the inequalities in wealth that had grown up between different branches of the Church, and share out the proceeds from rich bishoprics to poorer ones.

But when it comes to any wider social role, the Commissioners’ efforts seem distinctly limited. For a time, the Church had ownership of the philanthropic Octavia Hill Estates, a set of social housing developments across London let out to low-income households for fair rents. Yet low profit margins prompted the Commissioners to dispose even of these in 2011, selling them off in a move that led one local MP to accuse the Church Commissioners of ‘putting profit before people’. ‘The sleepy old Church of England is a greedy, money-grubbing property tycoon,’ spits the journalist Harry Mount, arguing that a ruthless commercialism belies its otherwise affable reputation. Professor Chris Hamnett castigates the Church’s outlook as being one of ‘philanthropy at 5 per cent’: ‘While the Church Commissioners engage in a limited amount of what might be termed “social investment”, their activities in this sphere are marginal to their major objective of income growth.’

One upcoming test of whether the Church venerates morals above Mammon will be whether it makes use of its extensive mineral rights to profiteer from fracking. In recent years, the Commissioners have been busily laying claim to 585,000 acres of underground deposits of stone, metals and minerals. The Church has explained, reasonably enough, that it’s simply re-registering ancient rights as part of an updating process mandated by the Land Registry, and that it has few active plans to exploit such rights with new mines or quarries. But with ongoing efforts by shale gas companies to frack across large swathes of northern England, there are fears the Church could seek to cash in. Rights to oil and gas were nationalised long ago, but the Commissioners could still profit by charging companies wanting to drill through mineral layers belonging to the Church. And though the C of E has divested itself of all investments in coal and tar sands, citing climate-change concerns, it still argues that fracking can be ‘morally acceptable’ if properly regulated. In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking.[fn3]

The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it?

It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land. Lastly, it should work closely with councils to earmark land for affordable housing, and stipulate that a decent percentage of its land be sold cheaply, at existing use value. At a time when church pews are emptier than ever, the Church needs urgently to engage in some more soul-searching, and show that it retains a social role in modern England.

Old institutions die hard, especially in a conservative country like England. Long after the Crown and Church lost most of their formal powers, they continue to hold sway – kept alive, in part, by their landed wealth. Understanding how these archaic, quasi-feudal pillars of the Establishment operate is crucial to grasping the nature of power in modern Britain, and critical to comprehending why land ownership in England remains so unequal.

The efforts of the Duchies and the Church to evade full scrutiny by Parliament and the public tell us something profound about how privilege tries to perpetuate itself. And the way that both Crown and Church have avoided trying to disclose their landholdings is telling, too: because the concealment of wealth from prying eyes is also critical to preserving it.

These ancient organisations have survived into the modern world by transforming their landed estates from medieval baronies into capitalist property portfolios while still trying to avoid public accountability and wider social responsibility. Some would like to see the Anglican Church disestablished, and the monarchy abolished outright. Personally, I’m ambivalent about that. But on the question of the land they own, it’s clear that the estates of the Crown and Church ought to be made to better serve the public interest.

Most of all, the Crown and Church still matter because of the wider Establishment they helped to create. Without William the Conqueror’s division of conquered lands to his loyal barons, and without the Church’s tacit moral blessing for this unequal hierarchy, England would have no landed elite.

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