Who Owns England? By Guy Shrubsole and Anna Powell-Smith (2016-present)
Who owns England?
Website documenting and mapping land property in England since August 2016
By Guy Shrubsole and Anna Powell-Smith
Main site: https://whoownsengland.org
Investigating land ownership tools & resources: https://whoownsengland.org/tools-and-resources
From the "About" page:
Who owns England? This blog is an attempt to answer that question – one of the most closely-guarded secrets in the thousand-year-old history of this country.
Who owns our country matters. It matters because land is a scarce resource – as Mark Twain put it, ‘they aren’t making it any more’ – and because ownership of it often confers wealth, power and influence. It matters because who owns land gets to choose how it’s used; and that has big implications for almost everything. Where we build our homes, how we grow our food, how we protect ourselves from flooding, how much space we set aside for wildlife – all this is hugely affected by who owns land.
Our quest follows in the footsteps of much greater adventurers, such as Kevin Cahill’s Who Owns Britain? (2001), a colossal work that re-opened the question of land ownership in the UK. Where Cahill simply lists the owners of England, however, we hope to map them. Taking advantage of the great strides made in digital mapping over the past fifteen years, we want to build the most comprehensive public map of land ownership in England: a modern Domesday, if you like.
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