Who owns Britain? I mean the actual acres. Have a guess and you may be wrong – I was.
The Forestry Commission owns 2.2 million acres and the Ministry of Defence 1.1 million acres. To put these numbers in context the UK is made up of about 60 million acres. The Crown Estate has 678,000 acres and in 4th place is the National Trust with 590,000 acres.
Our biggest land owner was founded in 1919 and is in public ownership theoretically. Likewise the Ministry of Defence land belongs, theoretically, to all of us. It is surprising the Crown Estate acres are relatively small. The National Trust in its present form is a recent entry. This institution is Marmite. It was formed to preserve buildings not acres. On the other hand it has bought a lot of land for public access, mostly coastal, so no need to trespass if you feel like jumping off a cliff.
The direction of travel is obvious. Land in private ownership is transitioning to public ownership. Fortunately there’s still a patchwork quilt of land in private ownership, all managed differently. A diversity of ownership means there are some bad custodians and, I prefer to think, increasingly landowners managing their acres responsibly and ethically. I fear we are edging into an Orwellian world in which “the people” will own the land but have no say in how it is managed. Something is happening …
I don’t think the triumvirate of luminaries who led the charge on founding the NT would recognise the “houses not acres” characterisation of their ambition. Canon Rawnsley, Octavia Hill, and someone else whose name I forget. Beatrix Potter was an acres girl.