40 ms·
Who Owns England?
- muninn_ 9y agoDoesn't support Safari apparently
- InitialLastName 9y ago> Sorry, you need to use a newer browser to see the map Or Chrome 58.0.3029.110, evidently.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoOr Firefox 53.0.3. uBlock/uMatrix disabled. Clearly we need browsers from the future to actually see the map.
- FrankenPC 9y agoThis shows me how little I knew. I thought the majority of land was owned by the royalty.
- wavefunction 9y agoDo you mean the aristocracy? You might be right.
- theoh 9y agoRoyalty in the UK would presumably mean just the members of the royal family, which has a fuzzy boundary. The aristocracy is a much larger group, obviously.
- wavefunction 9y agoYeah, that's why I brought it up. For some 'royalty' might mean any sort of nobility while I took the original poster's meaning as the House of Windsor. I would expect that much of the land in England is held by various members of the wider aristocracy. I make the distinction because as an American, many of my fellows conflate the two.
- lucaspiller 9y agoA lot of that is public knowledge, but not on any data sets (I'd assume because most land registry records are still on paper). For example, near where I grew up a whole village is owned by aristocracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlebredy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlebredy It was sold in 1797 to the current family, who was a wealthy banker, so they've always been like this? :D
- tialaramex 9y agoAll of the Land Registry is computerised. If you can point at a precise piece of property you can go online, right now, to their site and pay them a few quid for a PDF of the data. If you need to show it to a court of law (e.g. to prove who owns something in court) you can pay a bit more and get a physical piece of paper issued which the court will accept as a substitute for a person from the Register showing up in person and telling them who legally owns it. However, firstly (least importantly) not all land in England is registered. About 10-15% isn't registered. Registration is compulsory for new transfers today, but there are a large tracts of land whose owner hasn't changed for decades or even centuries, registration offers some benefits, but they're not obliged to register unless they want to transfer the property. Secondly, the paperwork may just say a place is owned by a corporation in a tax haven. Knowing the land my building is on is owned by "Property Holding Corp Sierra Sixty Eighteen" in the British Virgin Islands is almost exactly the same as not knowing who owns it.
- pjc50 9y agoDuke of Westminster, until recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/constructionandproperty/10500634/Duke-of-Westminster-no-longer-UKs-richest-property-magnate.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/construction... (highest value, not largest area)
- ascorbic 9y agoA lot is owned by the Crown (which is shown on the map), which isn't exactly the Queen but more accurately the state. The royals do own a lot of land themselves too. I'm surprised the map doesn't show holdings from, for example, The Duchy of Cornwall, which is Prince Charles's estate, and includes massive holdings around the country (not just in Cornwall), such as most of Dartmoor.
- tialaramex 9y agoThe site actually has an entire Blog Post about the Duchy of Cornwall https://whoownsengland.org/2017/03/15/what-land-does-the-duchy-of-cornwall-own/ https://whoownsengland.org/2017/03/15/what-land-does-the-duc... Basically the answer is that the Duchy pretends that it is simply a private person (Charles Windsor) and so it shouldn't be subject to any more prying into its affairs than would be the case for you or me. This is sufficiently arguable that it doesn't fear ridicule.
- prawnsalad 9y agoSays that I need a newer browser to see the map while I'm using the latest chrome, 58.
- deepsun 9y agoCheck JS error log? Looks fine on my Linux with latest Chrome (58.0.3029.110), with built-in (not discrete) Intel graphic card and standard drivers shipped with Linux Mint.
- TheGorramBatman 9y agoHave the same on Mac OS 10.12.5 with Chrome 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit)
- justinclift 9y agoSame, using latest Opera on OSX. Nothing showing up in the JS console, so it's probably Ublock origin or similar getting in the way. Or the site is just doing something a bit dumb. ;)
- matthewowen 9y agoYou probably don't have WebGL enabled, probably because of some annoying hardware incompatibility. This site seems to use MapboxGL, which doesn't fall back to Mapbox Classic.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoI'm also using Chrome 58 (on Mac) and it's working fine.
- ionised 9y agoAre you spoofing user agents? UMatrix/Ublock Origin can do this, not sure if it is by default though.
- panglott 9y ago"Who owns land is one of England's most closely-guarded secrets." This seems really strange to me. Why should this be the case? Some interesting information at their blog https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-we-know-so-far-where-next/ https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-... https://whoownsengland.org/2016/11/10/why-we-must-open-up-the-land-registry/ https://whoownsengland.org/2016/11/10/why-we-must-open-up-th...
- branchless 9y agoBecause land is where the real power is and the establishment don't want you to know that. They tax income instead of land. They don't want the tide turning on rentiers.
- pm90 9y agoThis is wayy too close to the truth. Historically, the wealthy and elite have dis-proportionally been landowners. And unlike money or precious metals, land actually holds value pretty well and, most importantly, can easily be handed down generations.
- mattgibson 9y ago> the wealthy and elite have dis-proportionally been landowners I'd put that the other way around, saying the land owners have disproportionately ended up as the wealthy and powerful. The ownership of land and the huge unearned income derived from renting it to the masses looks more like cause than effect to me.
- chrisseaton 9y agoIf you think people are wealthy and elite because they have got land, how do you explain how they got the land? I think either they bought it from the Crown, because they were wealthy, or they were granted it from the Crown, because they were part of the elite and did something for the Crown. Since you think it was the other way around, how do you explain how they got the land?
- root-z 9y ago"who owns england?" and then show Scotland too. how typical.
- alistairjcbrown 9y agoAnd Wales; it seems to show data across Great Britain
- falsedan 9y agomight have titled it, 'who owns Great Britain?', and avoided being labeled as 'typical'
- smhenderson 9y agoThe map also displays some data for Wales and Scotland, where landowners' data includes this; our project is focused on England. That's explained pretty early on in the article.
- twic 9y agoJudging by the size of the captions, Sealand is a more prominent place than Colchester! Okay that may not be remarkable if you're not from East Anglia.
- tomjohnneill 9y agoIf you added Oxford and Cambridge Universities to this, that would be really interesting. I've always been under the impression they own a huge amount of land around the country.
- twic 9y agoThere are all sorts of interesting things in this dataset. I live north of Finsbury Park in London. There's a big, well-established Turkish community here, embedded in the middle of decaying Victorian middle-class suburbs. You can trace the boundaries of it by the countries in which overseas companies are registered: in the Turkish area, they're registered in Cyprus, and in the more white areas, they're registered in the British Virgin Islands!
- nwah1 9y agoLand by value is a much more interesting question, than by acreage. Urban cores can be worth hundreds of thousands of times more, for the same amount of area.
- Retric 9y ago100,000 * farmland at ~5+k per acre is over 1/2 billion per acre which seems off for just land without buildings.
- colanderman 9y agoThere is a 1 acre condemned two-story garage adjacent to the skyscraper in which I work in downtown Boston. The land it sits on is valued by the assessor at $32 million. I would not be surprised to see an acre in say NYC or Tokyo go for 10× that figure.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ctrlaltdestroy 9y agoDon't know much about England. Does Crown Estate mean the royal family?
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoThis is tangential to their goal, but this looks like a promising start for mapping Scotland's land ownership, which is notoriously inequal (more than half the land is in the hands of less than 500 people).
- falsedan 9y agoDo you mean, get land ownership details from the Registers of Scotland? This OP project is for England and Wales only; Scottish land ownership is tracked by a separate organisation with better transparency rules. edit: they still charge £24 per property ownership lookup… I would hardly describe the landed estates of Scotland as 'notoriously unequal'; Much of the land in England is sold as leasehold, such that your house in Lambeth will revert to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 99 years unless some legal procedure (and fee, and solicitor's consideration) is paid (usually when selling). In Scotland, the leasehold is nigh-non-existent, and the standard ownership is a freehold (the property owner own the property in perpetuity). I think this project is to highlight the rent-seeking behaviour of the leaseholders.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoIt's unequal insofar as so much of the country is owned by such a small number of people, Scotland's supposedly the worst in the West in that respect.
- m3kw9 9y agoThe royal family there that has military there owns England
- olivermarks 9y agoOffshore companies own a lot of the valuable real estate in the UK, as explored by Private Eye in 2015 http://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry http://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry
- ascorbic 9y agoThis map uses the dataset obtained by Private Eye
- Lerc 9y agoAn interesting implication from this is there may be unowned land. Some areas may be owned by multiple people where each believes themselves to be the sole owner. Who becomes the final arbitor in such cases? The cynic in me would think that there's a the-crown-gets-it fallback.
- goodcanadian 9y agoUndoubtedly, the crown owns any "unowned" land. In cases where there is disputed title, the courts are the arbiter. There are probably not too many disputed titles anymore since the introduction of land registry was in the 18th century.
- m-i-l 9y agoUnowned land typically reverts to the occupier rather than The Crown. When I moved to London I used to live in Shoreditch, and there were many crumbling down buildings and second world war bomb sites, including one next to me that had been occupied by a rag-and-bone man for many years. When a developer wanted to buy the land for redevelopment, the original owner could not be found, and ownership was eventually reverted to the rag-and-bone man. There are many such stories of squatters inheriting valuable homes, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_George_Weiss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_George_Weiss .
- goodcanadian 9y agoThank you. I am not British, and I had forgotten that particular fact. Technically, the concept of "adverse possession" exists in Canada, as well, but in practice it doesn't really come up (either eviction proceedings occur quite quickly or in the case of a small piece of land--a fence in the wrong place, perhaps--the owner may "give permission" which is enough to maintain ownership rights). I suspect that it does not come up often in the UK, either. Post-WW2 was a bit of a special case. Anyway, the land in your example was not really "unowned." Rather the legal owner was different than the occupier, and turned out to be missing. I was referring more to the fact that the Crown is the ultimate legal owner of (essentially) all of the land in the UK (and Canada and other countries for that matter). Anything that does not have any other legal owner is definitely owned by the Crown. What would be called government land in the US is called Crown land in Canada (and presumably in the UK?).
- ForFreedom 9y agoWho owns the Reserve Bank of UK?
- ascorbic 9y agoThe Bank of England is owned by the government, specifically the "Government Legal Department".
- iDemonix 9y agoNice project, I was aware MoD had a good presence around Reading as I have friends that work there, I wasn't aware how big a presence it was.
- Yizahi 9y agoChurches are suspiciously absent. Aren't they the biggest landowners everywhere?
- pjc50 9y agoThe church owns a lot, but actually divested itself of quite a lot of its property portfolio in the 80s and 90s. Linked is some related stats: https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-we-know-so-far-where-next/ https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-... - CofE does not appear there either.
- gsnedders 9y agoWithin the Church of England, I believe the legal status is that the minister (or vicar, or whatever title they hold; I believe titles are relatively inconsistent!) has the freehold of the property (albeit under various bits of ecclesiastical law that limit their powers).
- ascorbic 9y agoThe map isn't supposed to be comprehensive. They don't have the data from the Church of England, mainly because it's not subject to FoI. But no, churches are big landowners but far from the biggest.
- literallycancer 9y agoI'd guess various state institutions like "state forests" are usually the biggest landholders. E.g. in Czech the churches are only claiming some 1-4% of the country in the restitution process (back in the day, everything was nationalized by the communists, so this is the way you can get it back).
- sjclemmy 9y agoI have come to the conclusion that the only way there could ever be any improvement in the way us Brits distribute our wealth (and by that I mean more equitably) is to have land reform. Nobody ever talks about this. I also think that unless some event happens that serves to dismantle (to a greater or lesser extent) the existing power structure, this will never happen.
- rwmj 9y agoThe Scottish government has been very vocal about land reform (eg https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/scotland-blog/2016/mar/17/a-new-dawn-for-land-reform-in-scotland https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/scotland-blog/2016/mar/1...) and even passed an Act last year (although the most significant amendments didn't pass).
- pjc50 9y agoYes, it's tiny steps but that's the only way it's ever going to get done. People are always going to claim that the tiniest bit of land reform will turn the country into Zimbabwe. I can't really see it happening in England.
- mattgibson 9y ago> Nobody ever talks about this. I've always assumed that this is because those who think land is just another free market commodity (it isn't) don't realise there's anything to talk about, so they keep quiet. However, those that understand realise they can use land to bypass the free market and get a constant flow of free money through rent. They then routinely lie about it so they get to carry on. My hope is that new technology such as the linked map of land ownership will lower the bar to learning how land works far enough that it becomes hard to lie about it effectively. Land is a monopoly, but most people are not even aware that economists describe it as such, let alone knowing how the monopoly works. I think once that begins to change, we will see reform. More of an education issue than anything else.
- tomelders 9y agoInteresting. The Hatfield Moors near Doncaster has a lot of land that is (or at least used to be) signposted as MOD. But this map shows it as "Other Government". I grew up around there, and there's always been odd stuff about the place. Like this now abandoned tower, that used to always have a military presence. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5536807,-0.9773292,3a,75y,265.99h,89.98t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sTKCEGfjbMo0GosBHoWpSRQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5536807,-0.9773292,3a,75y,...
- niklasrde 9y agoThe last issue of National Geographic (for the UK Amazon Prime subscriber available for free in Prime Reading) had a map of public land ownership in Scotland, and some NatGeo style impact reporting on it. Deer stalking, people, families, etc. Worth a read!
- arethuza 9y agoI can strongly recommend the excellent book "The Poor Had No Lawyers" for a look at the land ownership situation in Scotland: http://www.andywightman.com/poor-had-no-lawyers http://www.andywightman.com/poor-had-no-lawyers Edit: Another book I recommend to give a taste of the kinds of stuff that went on here is "Donald McLeod's Gloomy memories in the Highlands of Scotland" - a first hand account of the Clearances: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Donald-McLeods-memories-Highlands-Scotland/dp/1178001237 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Donald-McLeods-memories-Highlands-S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances
- erikb 9y agoSo mostly government, or public service companies. I think this is not even discussion worthy as long as there is not one big rich guy or purely private corp owning a lot. The only thing presented in the map getting close is the crown.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoWhen I visited some Oxbridge colleges the story was that the richest colleges owned land stretching from one coast to the other in a continuous band. The are still families with estates that own the associated village, I gather.
- marcoscarceles 9y agoIt's really interesting to see how many oaverseas companies own land in London and end up being in British Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar and other tax havens.
- nepotism2016 9y agoEither the author doesn't know England is not Britain or the domain wasn't available. Scotland and Wales are a different country to England
- rejschaap 9y agoThey know: "The map also displays some data for Wales and Scotland, where landowners' data includes this; our project is focused on England."
- nepotism2016 9y agoSo the domain wasn't available
- cafard 9y agoDe Tocqueville wrote that land ownership was for the rich only in England, because of the difficulty of ascertaining and defending title. This would have been around 1840, I suppose.
- tialaramex 9y agoTitle registration existed (though it was not by any means common) in England in 1840. Today you can't sell land unless it's registered, which is how this site was created. However many US states still don't have registration, because a thriving industry of "title insurance" companies depends upon them not having it so as to scare people into buying this otherwise useless insurance.
- pc2g4d 9y agoMy county's parcel map is public and names an owner for every bit of property in the county. I guess that's now how it works everywhere.
- Zekio 9y agoAm I the only one getting a warning about that I should use chrome to see the map while using chrome?