Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
About this ebook
Who owns England?
Behind this simple question lies this country’s oldest and best-kept secret. This is the history of how England’s elite came to own our land, and an inspiring manifesto for how to open up our countryside once more.
This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England’s elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide.
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.
From secret military islands to tunnels deep beneath London, Shrubsole unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country – at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. Melding history, politics and polemic, he vividly demonstrates how taking control of land ownership is key to tackling everything from the housing crisis to climate change – and even halting the erosion of our very democracy.
It’s time to expose the truth about who owns England – and finally take back our green and pleasant land.
*Guy's next book The Lie of the Land is out 12 September 2024*
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About the author
Guy Shrubsole is an environmental campaigner and writer. He is the author of Who Owns England?, an instant Sunday Times bestseller, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which won the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation and was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society Literary Prize, and The Lie of the Land. For the past decade and a half Guy has campaigned on the climate and nature crises, working for a wide range of organisations from Friends of the Earth and the Right to Roam campaign, to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). He lives in Devon.
