Who Owns England?. Guy Shrubsole

Чтение книги онлайн.

       1

       THIS LAND IS NOT MY LAND

      Nearly half the county I grew up in is owned by just thirty landowners.

      I was raised in Newbury in West Berkshire, a leafy part of the Home Counties. I always knew it was a well-off area; but only later in life did I discover just how much some of its inhabitants owned. Sixty-six thousand people – 40 per cent of the county’s population – live in settlements that cover a mere 2.4 per cent of the land. Yet 44 per cent of the county is owned by just thirty individuals and organisations. And the ways in which those landowners have chosen to use their land have impacted profoundly on the lives of everyone else living nearby. To appreciate what that means, let me take you on a tour of the place I called home.

      I spent much of my childhood outdoors, exploring. My parents were teachers at the local comprehensive, and I was lucky enough to grow up in a detached house with a big garden – one that was wild and rambling, full of trees and brambles and corners to hide in. Like Calvin in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, whose imagination often gets the better of him, I’d often find myself imagining my treehouse to be a fortress and that our backyard was an entire country.

      The earth in our garden also seemed to have magical properties. It was both a source of new life, alive with green shoots and shiny beetles, and a window onto the distant past. Once, I found a medieval silver penny in our vegetable patch, glistening in the dark soil. Something about that childhood experience of being close to the earth, of having a patch of ground to which I feel a sense of belonging, has stayed with me all my life.

      I was ten years old when they decided to drive a bypass through nine miles of countryside to the west of Newbury. In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had spoken of her admiration for the ‘great car economy’ and boasted of delivering ‘the largest road-building programme since the Romans’. In pursuit of this goal, the government gouged a motorway cutting through the ancient chalk downland of Twyford Down, and bulldozed hundreds of homes in East London for the M11 link road. Now the woods and water-meadows of West Berkshire were in the road lobby’s sights. To shave a few minutes off motorists’ journeys, it was deemed necessary to put a bypass through four Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

      The government had reckoned without a huge outpouring of opposition from local residents and activists from across the country, who flocked to Newbury and staged one of the largest environmental protests ever seen in the UK. My parents took me on the 8,000-strong march organised by Friends of the Earth along the route of the proposed bypass, snaking past beautiful heathland and through a civil war battlefield. I remember looking longingly at the protesters’ tree-houses perched high in the great oaks that were destined to be felled, and pleading with Dad to let me go and join them. ‘Maybe when you’re older,’ he’d said.

      Jim Hindle, one of the protesters who was old enough at the time to go and climb trees, later recounted: ‘The land to be lost to the road was meant to be compensated by the gift of other land elsewhere. But once it was gone, that was that.’ A new plantation would take years to grow and could never make up for the loss of ancient woodland, or the history that the road would obliterate. Where Hindle camped, ‘the rest of the Snelsmore reserve backed away over the Lambourn Downs in a primordial soup of ferns and birches and moss. It seemed like another country, stretching away further than we could rightfully imagine; half wild and ancient and vast.’

      Perhaps the potential to halt the road lay in gaining control over the land. A previous plan to put a motorway through Otmoor in Oxfordshire had been thwarted by the cunning of local Friends of the Earth members. They had bought a field along the route of the road called ‘Alice’s Meadow’ – a reference to Alice in Wonderland, whose author Lewis Carroll had been inspired by the landscape of Otmoor. Dividing the field into 3,500 separate parcels, they had sold each one to a different person. This made compulsory purchase by the authorities virtually impossible, since they would have had to do deals with every single one of the landowners. Instead, an alternative route for the road was chosen, and Otmoor was saved.

      Could opponents of the Newbury bypass count on the support of local landowners in halting the scheme? A young environmentalist, George Monbiot, initially hoped so. A huge swathe of land in the path of the bypass lay in the ownership of Sir Richard Sutton, a wealthy baronet who claims a lineage dating back to the Norman conquest. As Monbiot later recounted, ‘The Sutton Estate, just to the west of Newbury, covers some of the most exalted watermeadows in southern England. In 1983, when I was waterkeeper there, the manager told me not to cut too much of the bankside vegetation. The estate was the guardian of the countryside. As such it had a duty to preserve its ancestral character.’

      Hoping that this sense of noblesse oblige would make Sir Richard an ally against the bypass, Monbiot approached him to make common cause. But then the estate manager published his plans. ‘Claiming that he was powerless to stop the road, he requested that he be allowed to supply the hardcore: he would dig out a further 100 acres of the meadows for gravel. Beside the road, he proposed building 1,600 houses, a hotel and an 18-hole golf course. As the new bypass was СКАЧАТЬ