Who owns the sod?

Jerry Jones

As discovered by Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain 
(published in 2001 by Canongate), when first assigned the task of 
investigating land ownership for the first Sunday Times 
Rich List, information is hard to come by.

The Land Registry, in existence since 1925, has managed to 
register not much more than half — what's missing is the land 
owned by the rich.

However, during the course of piecing together information from 
press cuttings and records of wills and estates, Cahill heard 
about a "second Domesday Book" — a report submitted to 
Parliament in 1876.

He asked the Royal Agricultural Society if they had a copy. They 
assured him that there was no such thing, while, at the same 
time, possessing several copies in their library.

The Country Landowners Association at least admitted to having a 
copy, but refused to let Cahill see it.

Eventually, he was able to obtain a copy of extracts from Ealing 
library and, later, a view of the whole thing in the Devon and 
Exeter Institute.

The report, entitled The Return of Owners of Land, 
contains the names, addresses, acreages and valuations for all 
landowners of over one acre.

As Cahill puts it, Britain's "large landowners had been appalled 
by its appearance and moved, with their academic friends, to bury 
it. In this endeavour they were eminently successful, with 
nothing of significance written about it in 126 years. It had, in 
effect, vanished".

Having rediscovered it, Cahill was able to trace most of the 
missing estates and, in many cases, discover their current 
owners.

He found that just 189,000 families own two-thirds of the 60 
million acres in the UK, of which nearly three-quarters is owned 
by the top 40,000.

Meanwhile, Britain's 16.8 million homeowners account for barely 
four per cent of the land, about the same as that owned by the 
Forestry Commission, the top institutional landowner.

The highest landowner is the Duke of Buccleuch with 277,000 acres 
and the wealthiest is the Duke of Westminster with 140,000 acres, 
including 100 acres in London's Mayfair, which is valued at 3.35 
billion pounds alone, and 200 acres in Belgravia, its even more 
expensive neighbour.

Land owned and controlled by Britain's royal family, comprising 
the Crown Estates, the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster and 
private land, amounts to around 677,000 acres.

However, some 5.6 million acres — nearly 10 per cent of 
Britain's landmass — could still not be accounted for.

Most of the big private estates can be traced to appropriations 
and handouts from the reigning monarch in bygone days and, more 
recently, through purchases by those who had made money through 
large-scale theft in other ways.

The first great land grab came with the Norman Conquest, when 
William donated the lands acquired to himself and his brigands.

The second came when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and 
distributed their 10 million acres to those followers and barons 
willing to accept the new church and impose it in their local 
areas.

Third, some major redistributions and awards of land according to 
political allegiances took place during Cromwell's rule and 
following the Restoration, which more or less settled the broad 
nature and ownership of Britain's land through to the present 
time.

This was consolidated further between 1700 and 1900, when common 
land used for grazing was incorporated into private estates 
through the various Enclosure Acts pushed through Parliament by 
the big landowners themselves or their representatives.

Most freeholds of owner-occupied houses and businesses that exist 
today derive from the big landowners cashing in from selling off 
small parcels of their land to property developers.

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Morning Star