Book review - Who Owns England?

My favourite read of 2019 was Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole, so perhaps this won't be a very interesting review as I am tempted to just rave about it. I think everyone who lives in or likes to travel in England should read it and I have very little to critique about it. But I'll try to give you a sense of what it's like to entice you to pick it up.

The premise of the book is simple: it's a detailed breakdown of the major categories of land holders in England, based on some truly amazing sleuthing and data analysis. It reveals how much of England is held by the crown, the church, the aristocracy, Oxbridge colleges, private sector companies and off-shore investors, the military and public sector trusts. (Spoiler alert: it's a lot.) But more than that, Who Owns England? gives the reader the history behind that ownership for context and perspective. In that sense, it's one of those rare and wonderful history books that gives a history not of great men and women, but of ordinary people and the land on which they lived and worked.

It also doesn't shy away from discussing the problems that have arisen from the way land ownership and management has progressed over this long history, despite the taboos and sensitivities preventing honest and critical discussion. To pull out an illustrative example using a clumsy segue:

"Any discussion about how best to use our land is inherently skewed by the grossly unequal pattern of land ownership. Imagine inviting 100 people to a birthday party. Then, when you get to the stageof cutting up the cake, one of the guests steps forward to announce that half the cake is already theirs - and not only are they having their cake, they're eating it too. How different is this, really, from the numerous 'stakeholder meetings' that civil servants hold about how best to use our land, day in, day out? Invariably, the attendees and lobbyists at such events - the CLA, the NFU and so on - represent 'land owning interests'. They have every right to be heard, but they represent a tiny fraction of the population - the 1 per cent who own half the land deciding how to use a common resource that everyone depends on."

Shrubsole doesn't call for a violent upheaval to "redistribute" land and resources, but rather points to pragmatic reforms to ensure that land is managed in the public's interest, that national needs for housing, food, clean water and nature are met sustainably.

Overall, it's full of lefty frustration (that's frustration of lefties, not frustration with lefties) but also ends with some pragmatic policy solutions to the skyrocketing house prices and environmental destruction that are the symptoms of Britain's land use problems. In the UK we tend to see ourselves as a small island with limited space, and the right have used this mindset as a chance to blame immigration as a process and immigrants themselves, rather than blaming the systems that reinforce this inequality. That's not to blame the people who currently own most of the land, but Shrubsole does call for policies that ensure that those who do hold the land act as more responsible stewards, and that the concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands does not continue unchecked.

If land ownership sounds boring to you, I challenge you to try this book. Land management touches on so many political, historical, economic and environmental issues. We can all relate to issues around housing and urban planning. In Cambridge, where I live, the lack of affordable housing in combination with business and institutions using any square meter of land in Cambridge as a land bank and hiking up the prices accordingly means that we have a shamefully large homeless and insecurely housed population for how wealthy a city we are on average. We may be an extreme example, but we're far from unique in the UK, where the division between the haves and have nots has driven the political turmoil of the last decade. And, as a hiker, I can relate to Shrubsole's frustration with enclosure - the ubiquitous walls and fences that keep me pinned to a thin strip of vast landscapes that could just as easily be open to the right to roam. For anyone who cares about the environment, this should be a huge red flag. Behind those walls, land owners effectively have carte blanche to do whatever they want (and, as George Monbiot discussed in Feral, are sometimes actively incentivised to cut back hedgerows and copses). That is a frightening prospect at a time when we need to double tree cover and take drastic action to protect our biodiversity.

We should all care about who owns England, and more importantly, what they're doing with it, and Shrubsole's book is an excellent place to start. If you want a quicker introduction to his work, check out his blog, "Who Owns England?", which takes a more abbreviated look at some of the issues covered in the book.