This is going to be a great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country' George Monbiot Shrubsole estimates that 30% of all England’s land is still owned by the aristocracy and gentry. The 6th Duke of Westminster at least had the grace to admit that he hadn’t become Britain’s biggest landowner by the sweat of his brow. When asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs, the billionaire said, “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. When he died he passed his entire estate to his then 25-year-old son who is currently the subject of a campaign by activists. In 2015, the Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson lodged a freedom of information (FOI) request with the Land Registry, the official record of land ownership in England and Wales. He asked it to release a database detailing the area of land owned by all UK-registered companies and corporate bodies. Eriksson later shared this database with me, and what it revealed was astonishing. Here, laid bare after the dataset had been cleaned up, was a picture of corporate control: companies today own about 2.6m hectares of land, or roughly 18% of England and Wales. Behind this simple question lies this country's oldest and best-kept secret. This is the history of how England's elite came to own our land, and an inspiring manifesto for how to open up our countryside once more.

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. So who is right? This is a complex area, but one that is important to investigate. Can the Land Registry’s corporate ownership data help us get to the bottom of it? As these estates have not been sold on the open market, their ownership does not need to be recorded at the Land Registry, the public body responsible for keeping a database of land and property in England and Wales. The book traces the bizarre history of land ownership in England, from the ur-landgrab of the Norman conquest right down to the present day. Separate chapters offer potted histories of major players, then marshall the best available information to estimate their current holdings. The One Percent

Peel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions. In 2008, it emerged that Peel was a dominant force behind a business grouping that had formed to lobby against Manchester’s proposed congestion charge. The charge was aimed at cutting traffic and reducing the toxic car fumes choking the city. But Peel, as owners of the out-of-town Trafford Centre shopping mall, feared that a congestion charge would be bad for business, discouraging shoppers from driving through central Manchester to reach the mall. Peel’s lobbying paid off: voters rejected the charge in the local referendum and the proposal was dropped.

Public bodies including the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence and all local authorities combined own 8.5 percent – only half the size of the 17 percent which remains 'unregistered land'. Shrubsole's educated guess is that most of this is also owned by the aristocracy. And who was this Ms Mary Davies to be so wealthy one may wonder? A Royal Princess perhaps? A friend of Dukes and Earls? Or, dare I suggest it, even the King’s mistress? 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. There are grasps at disparate bits of theory (Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Adam Smith) but it’s clear that they haven’t really been understood, and the author doesn’t engage with them beyond citing the odd line.

Summary

The pandemic has reminded us that access to land is critical to our mental and physical wellbeing. Children in particular desperately need wild and interesting places in which they can freely roam. A large body of research, endorsed by the government, suggests that our mental health is greatly enhanced by connection to nature. Yet we are forced to skulk around the edges of our nation, unwelcome anywhere but in a few green cages and places we must pay to enter, while vast estates are reserved for single families to enjoy.

Though the veil of secrecy around company structures and what corporations own is at last lifting, thanks to recent data disclosures by government, there’s still much that needs to be done to make sense of this new information. The Land Registry needs to disclose proper maps of what companies own if we are to get to the bottom of suspect practices like land banking, and give communities a fighting chance in local planning battles.Farms owned by the Crown and wealthy landowners get hundreds of thousands of pounds every year in farm subsidies!!! Even when they're not actively farming, they just need to own the land, and the more land they own, the more dosh they get!!!!!!!! What a positively screwy system!!! In the unpromising format of an Excel spreadsheet, a compelling picture emerged. Alongside the utilities privatised by Margaret Thatcher and John Major – the water companies, in particular – and the big corporate landowners, were PLCs with multiple shareholders. There were household names, such as Tesco, Tata Steel and the housebuilder Taylor Wimpey, and others more obscure. MRH Minerals, for example, appeared to own 28,000 hectares of land, making it one of the biggest corporate landowners in England and Wales. Though there's more precision here than ever before, the outline of the story is familiar. But in each section, the foreground is filled in with well-chosen examples of finer-grained detail. The narrative is surprisingly fast moving, a personal journey of discovery interspersing historical and analytical passages with first-person tales of adventure, such as a descent into secret tunnels under central London. An Old Story Retold