This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain's Countryside

by Marion Shoard

Genres: Nonfiction

560 pages, Paperback

First published April 23, 1987

About the author

Marion Shoard is an English writer and campaigner. She is best known for her work concerning access to the countryside and land use conflicts. In 2002 she became the first person to give a name to the "edgelands" between town and country. Since 2004 she has also written and campaigned about older people's issues.

Reviews

[Graham Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This feels like a very important book, and one that everyone in the UK should have a duty to read, but at nearly 500 pages, and with a style that is mostly very academic, it's a daunting prospect. I have to admit that I struggled to get to the end.
It's a comprehensive account of the history of land ownership, and a detailed analysis of who owns the land now, as well as a comparison to more favourable systems in other countries - particularly in Europe and Scandinavia (Swedes and Danes should count themselves fortunate indeed in their access to the countryside in which they live).
The language is often scholarly and dry, even awkward. But when the author sets out the destruction of the land through the intensification of farming since the last war, and the spread of conifer plantations across the land, her prose begins to flow with an intense passion. I was captivated by the way she set out the cataclysmic destruction of the land, which I have experienced first hand - powerful stuff.
The idea that the big, aristocratic estates have all been split up is, apparently, a myth - they're actually bigger than they've ever been. Titled families own nearly half of the land, and around 80% of Britain's rural land is owned by individuals (often through the use of trusts). Landowners (including farmers) are massively over represented in central and local government, and all of their agencies - even the Nature Conservancy Council. People are excluded from a large proportion of woods, riverbanks, private estates, as most of the land is reserved for rich people to shoot pheasants, and the like. The limited network of footpaths - all that remains of the people's right of access to the land of their birth - is poorly maintained and often deliberately obstructed by land owners (again, something I've seen a great deal of myself).

Marion Shoard quotes David Lloyd George, in a quote from 1909:
'...who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?'

Equally upsetting is the scale of subsidies and tax breaks for landowners:
'Like agriculture, forestry is subsidised by the citizenry whose birthright it is laying waste.'

In her epilogue to the 1997 update to the book (which was originally published in 1987) she says, 'For the first thousand years [AD] the land of Britain was effectively in the hands of its people. The last thousand years have been a kind of dark age in which the people have been shunted into a landless wilderness while the few have lorded it over their space.'

This is an extensive, forthright, and deeply upsetting account of the dispossession of the people; their separation from the land and from the natural world.

[KG · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was originally published in 1987, and I got hold of a later edition (the Gaia Classics one) that included a 1997 update. There are often a few second hand copies available online.

It is still well worth a read as it has been meticulously and painstakingly researched. The first part takes us through the history of land ownership, which basically took off with William the Conqueror giving out land to his barons, and some of this land has been passed down through families over hundreds of years.

Later on we learn about issues such as rights of way, the right to roam, common land and planning laws, and the history of how these were introduced. The author has done a very thorough job.