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William Collins
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Guy Shrubsole 2019
Cover design by Anna Morrison. Illustration by John Woodcock/Getty Images
Guy Shrubsole asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008321710
Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008321697
Version: 2020-03-07
‘A formidable, brave and important book’
Robert Macfarlane
‘One of the most important books of the year’
Chris Packham
‘A great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country’
George Monbiot
‘An irrefutable and long overdue call for the enfranchisement of the landless’
Marion Shoard, author of This Land is Our Land
‘The question posed by the title of this crucial book has, for nearly a thousand years, been one that as a nation we have mostly been too cowed or too polite to ask. There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour. Shrubsole ends his fine inquiry into these issues with a 10-point prospectus as to how this millennium-long problem might be brought up to date, and how our land could be made to work productively and healthily for us all’
Observer, Book of the Week
‘Both detective story and historical investigation, Shrubsole’s book is a passionately argued polemic which offers radical, innovative but also practical proposals for transforming how the people of England use and protect the land that they depend on – land which should be “a common treasury for all”’
Guardian
‘Painstakingly researched … having come to the end of this illuminating and well-argued book it’s hard not to feel that it’s time for a revolution in the way we manage this green and pleasant land’
Melissa Harrison, New Statesman
‘There is an enormous amount to admire’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Shrubsole is an entertaining guide to the history of landownership’
Literary Review
‘A catastrophising Left-wing polemic imbued with parodic student-union chippiness’
Owen Paterson, former Environment Secretary
Who possesses this landscape?
The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?
– Norman MacCaig
CONTENTS
3 The Establishment: Crown and Church
8 A Property-Owning Democracy?
10 An Agenda for English Land Reform