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. He begins with the historical context and the Domesday Book, in which William the Conqueror compiled an inventory of the country he had conquered. Significant land holdings were giving to those who had helped him achieve power and their heirs. Some may be disappointed to find no revolutionary proposals for the compulsory redistribution of land. Although the book does end with a rousing call to 'action', in practice most of the actions called for come down to agitation in favour of reform. He brings the material alive with examples and anecdotes, beginning with his childhood memories of West Berkshire, an apparently affluent, leafy county, but one riven by divisions by the Greenham Common airbase, and the Newbury bypass. Both spurred iconic protests and both are, in a sense, about land and who owns and controls it. Newbury MP and former environment minister Richard Benyon is also a wealthy landowner. 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.”

From the Duke who owns the most expensive location on the Monopoly board to the MP who's the biggest landowner in his county, he unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England’s elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide. 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. An interesting read, which sheds new light on the state of land in England and what needs to be done to bring rights and equality to all of us who live amongst this nations' rich and diverse landscape. Atlantic Oakwood forests, woodlands variously referred to in Britain as Upland Oakwoods, Atlantic Oakwoods, Western Oakwoods, Temperate Rainforest, Caledonian forest, and colloquially as Celtic Rainforests. [10] His book on the subject was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society Literary Prize [11] and longlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation. [12]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.

Shrubsole, Guy (29 April 2021). "Life finds a way: in search of England's lost, forgotten rainforests". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 January 2022. Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson. 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. Despite the fact I have prior knowledge on the law regarding all things land, this is a very accessible read for those with none. I wasn't sure whether it would be quite dry given the topic and having not read anything from Shrubsole before, but it was fascinating more than anything. The author is a friends of the earth activist/campaigner and writer and certainly seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to this topic. For centuries land ownership has been shrouded in mystery and Mr Shrubsole makes a compelling case for reform and some very intriguing and effective ways as to how to begin the reforms process. Victoria Harbour building at Salford Quays, owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Mike Robinson/AlamyThis book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England's elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide. 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? 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. In England, land ownership is “our oldest, darkest, best-kept secret”. Guy Shrubsole, an activist for Friends of the Earth, has dedicated the last few years to uncovering who really owns the land. Using complex datasets from the Land Registry, freedom of information requests, and other tools available thanks to EU environmental rules, he has managed to lift the veil of secrecy: “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.”

The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. 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 Shrubsole writes that the bulk of the population owns very little land or none at all. Those who own homes in England, in total, own only 5% of the country. I have no time for the ‘feudalism still exists’ argument, which one sometimes sees from both XR-types, freemen-on-the-land conspiracists, and the significant overlap between the two. Just because something looks a bit feudal, because a landowner has a title, doesn’t mean that present conditions aren’t deeply capitalist. They need to be understood as such. It’s also ahistorical to claim much of a meaningful link between contemporary land ownership and grants from William the Conqueror.The book doesn’t challenge the notion of land ownership per se. Instead, as is increasingly common post-Piketty, it’s really an argument for fairer distribution. Sometimes this touches on jingoism, and sometimes it leads to absurd demands (restoring gravelkind succession rights to female aristocrats). But ultimately it gives a sense that what the author really wants is a return to some sort of system of smallholding, which isn’t really appropriate to post-industrial societies. My one query was who exactly Shrubsole means by "we", in the subtitle and throughout the book. Presumably it's just campaigner's shorthand for the 99 percent of the population who don't own very much of England at all, and have little chance of ever doing so. But putting it this way suggests some halcyon bygone days in which "we" did own the land, which is an unhelpful fiction.