Then there is publicly owned land, which could be used for the public good, but is being steadily sold off, either by a central government with an ideological agenda, or local authorities desperate for cash. There are the landownings of the royal family and the Crown and the church. There is land owned by wealthy individuals and corporations, including pension funds. Who owns Britain? A good question, and it looks like there are people about who would have it that you still don’t know the answer.

Strictly speaking the Crown still owns all English land, though in practice it directly controls 'only' around 1.4 percent of it. The Church of England owns 0.5 percent, but is oddly vague about the much larger areas it sold off. It’s easy to despair but what I love about this book is that Shrubsole is angry but also positive and determined. His final chapter is an agenda for English land reform, a series of proposals to make land ownership more open, fair, and widely distributed. She said one effect of the sale of public land was that the public lost democratic control of that land and it could not then be used, for example, for housing or environmental improvements. “You can’t make the best social use of it,” she added. It’s simply not right that aristocrats, whose families have owned the same areas of land for centuries, and large corporations exercise more influence over local neighbourhoods – in both urban and rural areas – than the people who live there.

Summary

It's no spoiler to reveal that the book does not literally provide a list of who owns every parcel of land in England. Undertaking that mammoth – but entirely feasible – task should after all be the job of the Land Registry. As might be expected, the Registry's continued refusal to see this as its role is a recurring theme. With characteristic optimism, Shrubsole suggests speeding up progress by including "a modern Domesday Survey of all land ownership" in the 2021 census. A fascinating investigation into land and property ownership in England. It's a wide ranging and surprising account which embraces Government departments, Russian Oligarchs, Sheikhs, grouse hunting estates, entrepreneurs and, of course, the aristocracy. 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 What’s astonishing about his research is how little has changed in the last 1,000 years. His figures reveal that the aristocracy and landed gentry – many the descendants of those Norman barons – still own at least 30% of England and probably far more, as 17% is not registered by the Land Registry and is probably inherited land that has never been bought or sold. Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. The homeowners’ share adds up to just 5%: “A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of Middle England put together.” There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour. An environmental campaigner for Friends of the Earth, he has used multiple freedom of information requests and a large network of crowdsourced informants and number crunchers to build up a credible picture of the pattern and detail of who owns what. Even so, he has come up against plenty of virtual Keep Out and No Trespassing signs, and some of his findings necessarily rely on best guesswork. The land monopolist has only to sit and watch his property multiplying in value, without effort or contribution Winston Churchill, 1909

The figures show that if the land were distributed evenly across England’s population, each person would have just over half an acre – an area roughly half the size of Parliament Square in central London. When once asked how young entrepreneurs might succeed in Britain, the late Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor (owner of 131,000 acres, including much of London’s Belgravia and central Liverpool), observed, drily, that they should “make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. Though Shrubsole estimates that the recent sell-off of ancestral lands to the “new money” of hedge-funders and oligarchs accounts for perhaps 17% of the total in England, 30% rests in the hands of the feudal Norman “cousinhood”, whose offspring have until recently preserved their birthright with a Downton-esque doggedness. This is an exhaustively researched labour of love, but the argument has a fatal flaw. It’s a book about the extent of ownership in absolute terms (who owns what percentage) but this really isn’t the point. But to really get under the skin of how companies treat the land they own, and the wider repercussions, we need to zoom in on the housing sector, where debates about companies involved in land banking and profiteering from land sales are crucial to our understanding of the housing crisis.

Shrubsole, Guy (29 April 2021). "Life finds a way: in search of England's lost, forgotten rainforests". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 January 2022. Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has used these 21st century tools to uncover a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public. Accompanying the book is a new right to roam campaign calling for this right in England to be extended to rivers, woodland, downland and uncultivated land in the green belt, and to include camping, kayaking, swimming and climbing. This is less comprehensive than the rights in Scotland, which, despite the dire predictions of the landowners, have caused little friction and a massive improvement in public enjoyment. But it would greatly enhance the sense that the nation belongs to all of us rather than a select few. A petition to parliament launched by Guy Shrubsole, author of another crucial book, Who Owns England?, seeks to stop the criminalisation of trespass. Please sign it.

This is going to be a great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country’ George Monbiot Who Owns England? is a brave, important, timely and hopeful book. It contains information all citizens should understand and also practical suggestions to achieve a more equitable and sustainable future. Shrubsole estimates that 18% of England is owned by corporations, some of them based overseas or in offshore jurisdictions. He has based this calculation on a spreadsheet of land owned by all UK-registered companies that has been released by the Land Registry. From this spreadsheet, he has listed the top 100 landowning companies.The question, who owns England? is such a simple question. And yet the answer to this is one of our country’s oldest and best-kept secrets. And the keepers of those secrets? Our ancient aristocracy and elite, who between them own vast swathes of our land. So much so, that only 1% (yes one per cent) of the population of the country owns 50% of the land. The Land Registry only knows for definite around 83% of the actual owners of the land of England. Prominent on the list are the Boughton estate in Northamptonshire, belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, the Woburn estate, which is owned by the Duke of Bedford, and the Badminton estate in Gloucestershire, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. Several large grouse moor estates and Beeswax Dyson Farming, a farm owned by pro-Brexit businessman James Dyson, are also high on the list. The Crown owns large tracts, as you’d expect and pays tax on the income from those lands. However, it uses its two Duchy’s (Cornwall and Lancaster) to ensure that it isn’t paying tax on other vast swathes of land it has spread all around the country. A lot of land is owned by organisations like the National Trust, the Forestry Commission, the Church owns a lot too, but not as much as they used to, plus other big businesses now own substantial amounts. However, most of the elite and aristocracy don’t want people knowing how much land they have nor do they want you to know how much they are able to claim in benefits from it. They have built walls, moved villages and used the enclosure acts to steal the common land for their own use. All to stop us discovering exactly how much they own. This gets us to the heart of the housing crisis. Sure, we need housing developers to build more homes. But most of all we need them to build affordable homes. And developers that are forced to pay through the nose to persuade landowners to part with their land end up with less money left over for good-quality, affordable housing. By all means, let’s continue to pressure housebuilders whenever they try to renege on their planning agreements. But at root, we have to find ways to encourage landowners of all kinds – corporate or otherwise – to part with their land at cheaper prices. Shrubsole estimates that “the aristocracy and gentry still own around 30% of England”. This may even be an underestimate, as the owners of 17% of England and Wales remain undeclared at the Land Registry. The most likely owners of this undeclared land are aristocrats, as many of their estates have remained in their families for centuries.