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. 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!!! 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. 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.

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 StatesmanWho 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.

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. Wild Fell Wins Top Literary Prize for Nature Writing". Richard Jefferies Society . Retrieved 3 August 2023. Shrubsole was born in Newbury, Berkshire [3] and attended St Bartholomew's School. [4] Work [ edit ]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. 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 Who owns England? History of England's land ownership and how much is privately owned today". Countryfile magazine . Retrieved 7 April 2021. Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole review – why this land isn't your land". The Guardian. 28 April 2019 . Retrieved 7 April 2021.

Shrubsole, Guy (29 April 2021). "Life finds a way: in search of England's lost, forgotten rainforests". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 January 2022. The book’s findings are drawn from a combination of public maps, data released through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. Shoppers in the Trafford Centre, a shopping mall until recently owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty

Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson. 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.” 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. I have to wonder, though, whether the Duke of Westminster in making his notorious comment was perhaps being a little coy or even trying to deflect attention away from the source of his great wealth, the Grosvenor Estate, comprising land that is now the ritziest part of London - Mayfair, Belgravia, Grosvenor Square and the rest of it. He calculates that the land under the ownership of the royal family amounts to 1.4% of England. This includes the Crown Estate, the Queen’s personal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk, and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which provide income to members of the family.