There are few more elegant or eloquent statements about the role of family-estate ownership in the modern age than that made by Lord Clinton of the Clinton Devon estates in Devon. In perhaps the most extensive research for many years into how rural Britain is owned, and therefore managed,. Country Life has discovered a huge change in land-holding patterns, one that will shape the future of rural Britain for years to come, and is little understood.
The key change is from family estates into corporate estates, often, as in the case of the National Trust, run from a centralised headquarters. Inevitably, and with the best will in the world, corporate ownership is management dominated, and, as such, deeply influenced by people with careers to mind, not permanent places in a local community to consider.
But, before embarking on the present situation, here is a little of the very-little-known history of landownership in rural Britain, and the changes that have occurred to that ownership. The starting point for this is , when Parliament commissioned a second Domesday Book of the UK see box.
Unlike the original Domesday Book of , which treated all land as owned by one person, the king, the second one, properly titled The Return of Owners of Land, listed, in four volumes, the owners of all land above one acre in size in the UK. What this showed on analysis was that the rural UK was almost entirely owned and managed by family estates, some of them very large. But what it also showed was an almost complete absence of State or corporate ownership. Seven of the 11 largest landowners in modern Britian did not exist years ago, and all, such as the National Trust, are corporate estates.
The British Empire, the largest the world had ever known, used a mere , acres of the country to house and train its entire military force. Compare that with the current holdings of the Ministry of Defence, which are , acres in the UK and , leased acres in Canada. Of the estates extant in , and which formed almost the totality of the rural world, some were of great antiquity, especially in England.
They were also the structure that nurtured the British nation, for good and ill. Use your right to roam. Access land includes mountains, moors, heaths and downs that are privately owned.
It also includes common land registered with the local council and some land around the England Coast Path. Over , hectares , acres of the English uplands are tied up in huge grouse-moor estates owned by around people. The Duke of Northumberland, whose family lineage stretches back to Domesday, owns 40, hectares , acres — a tenth of his home county. A handy chart showing the division of land ownership in England.
Farmers are represented in most sectors — either as direct landowners gentry or tenants of the aristocracy, new money, conservation charities and others. Indeed, many of the largest landowners in the country today owe their standing to decisions made by the Norman king William almost 1, years ago. After conquering England, William declared all land belonged ultimately to him, before parcelling it out to his cronies: his barons and his allies in the Church. While the Church would have some of its land later seized by Henry VIII, and frittered more of it away through poor accounting, the aristocracy kept hold of their slice of the cake.
When the Victorians ordered a rare census of landowners, they found that just 4, lords and gents owned half the country. Since the industrial revolution, aristocratic families have been joined by successive waves of newly moneyed landowners. In the Edwardian period, industrialists who had made it often acquired land and titles in order to join the ranks of the upper crust; the beer-making Guinness family became the Earls of Iveagh and Lords of the 8,hectare 20,acre Elveden Estate.
Recent decades have seen Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs buy into London real estate and English country houses off the back of oil wealth and the sell-off of Soviet state enterprises. Some of the largest corporate landowners are household names, such as Tesco and BT.
Others are more mysterious, such as Peel Estates, a property and retail conglomerate that owns swathes of Manchester, or the Badgworthy Land Company, which possesses a large chunk of Exmoor for shooting pheasants. Still others cloak their ultimate owners through complex corporate structures, registered in offshore tax havens. The State became a significant landowner in the 20th century in the wake of the First World War.
A timber crisis caused by demand for wooden pit props and trench boards led to the creation of the Forestry Commission, sending serried ranks of Sitka spruce marching over many a hill. The need for army training grounds led the British military to acquire much land, sometimes through requisitioning, and often in secret. But recent decades have seen a great sell-off of public land, from council homes being sold under Right to Buy, to the privatisation of water companies and the railways.
Catching up swiftly are foreign investors and even supermarkets. They receive subsidies and most of their assets are held in trust, avoiding inheritance tax. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Argos AO. Privacy Policy Feedback.
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