He was born in Newbury in Berkshire and was 10 years old when the eco-warrior protests about the town’s bypass became a national news story in 1996. Shrubsole became obsessed with the great unspoken question in part because of a walking knowledge of the countryside in which he grew up. The land monopolist has only to sit and watch his property multiplying in value, without effort or contribution 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. 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.
There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour.
For an individual to discover all that is known about land ownership in England would cost more than £72m. In England such a request carries a fee and is often frustrated by vague legal niceties around compulsory registration. In France, you can pitch up at your local town hall and ask to see, free of charge, a map of who owns what in your neighbourhood.
That particular phrase has less weight when you consider that only 5% of English land is owned by householders, while 18%, by Shrubsole’s calculations, is in the control of corporate structures and offshore companies, many of them opaque. Secrecy about ownership has become deliberately entwined with “an Englishman’s home is his castle” nonsense. Knowledge of the other 17% remains out of bounds even to parliament. One of the most telling facts in Guy Shrubsole’s book is the revelation that the Land Registry – a body that George Osborne wanted to privatise – possesses details of the ownership of only 83% of England’s green and pleasant plot. The last major attempt at land reform, which involved a census of ownership, was attempted by the Liberal government of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in 1909 it led to constitutional crisis, neutered proposals and partial data. Since the Domesday Book set the standard for a comprehensive land ownership survey – in part so the conqueror could hoover up some of the choicest millions of acres for the crown and its appetite for the hunt – England has never properly addressed the issue. 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.
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