renting it out, as a way to make some extra cash. We can’t be sure, given the Church’s silence on the matter, but it seems that many vicars chose to make a quick buck by flogging off the land. After all, faced with the government’s abolition of tithes in 1936 (which took place as a result of rural workers’ and landowners’ campaigns in the wake of the Great Depression), and with dwindling church congregations in an increasingly secular society, some parishes must have felt the need to sell off their assets to make ends meet.
‘Stealing land is difficult to do,’ muses the land rights activist Gill Barron, who’s also looked into the loss of glebe land. ‘You can’t exactly roll it up in a carpet and carry it away. But … the undercover transfer of ownership of land is, in fact, incredibly easy in a country where the records of who owns what are a jealously guarded secret.’ And the Church has certainly helped keep the secret closely guarded.
Wresting control of glebe land away from vicars and handing it to dioceses was a belated attempt by the C of E hierarchy to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted. Yet the financial impetus to sell up has clearly remained – hence the continued decline in glebe since the 1970s. ‘Because of its original purpose, glebe land is usually situated within a settlement or close on the outskirts of the settlement, with a high chance of it being zoned for development,’ write the estate agents Savills. This, they state, ‘can make the land very valuable’.
You’ll probably have walked past a Glebe Close or Glebe Field near where you live: in some cases, the Church may retain ownership, but usually the site will have been sold on long ago for development. Some of this former glebe land even appears to have found its way into the hands of offshore companies based in tax havens. For example, Land Registry data lists land at Glebe Farm in Ruislip, West London, as now belonging to Blackfriars Holdings Ltd, based in the British Virgin Islands; while Glebe House in Bedford belongs to Glebe Ltd, registered in the Channel Islands. There are dozens more such examples, and likely countless other glebe fields that have been sold for shopping malls or buried beneath roads.
The loss of glebe lands tells us two things. First, it confirms the great cloak of secrecy that continues to envelop land ownership in England, and how our established institutions continue to promote this – in the case of the Church, perhaps out of embarrassment for what full transparency would reveal.
Second, it’s an early case study in the financialisation of land. The Church’s sale of glebe lands anticipated the great privatisation of public land later enacted by Margaret Thatcher’s government and her successors. In doing so, however, the Church wasn’t embarking on some ideological plan; rather, it simply succumbed to that oldest of sins, human greed.
Despite having allowed its clergy to sell off so much of the family silver, the Church today still boasts a property portfolio worth at least £8 billion. Its finances have been kept afloat by the Church Commissioners, a central body set up in 1948 to manage the Church’s property assets. The Church Commissioners own land totalling around 105,000 acres, on top of what the dioceses own – and in 2017 this land generated a whopping £226 million of income for the Church.
What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’
Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years. But such business acumen has seen them take up the mantle of property developers, and sell off affordable residential housing in favour of more lucrative commercial developments.
‘The pressure to generate the investment income needed by the Church of England,’ argues housing expert Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, ‘has led to an increasingly commercial attitude towards their land and property investments.’ Although the Commissioners, he maintains, ‘retain a small residual social commitment to “housing the poor”’, their properties have ‘increasingly come to be viewed as an investment like any other’.
Back when the Church Commissioners were established after the Second World War, the Church had some 60,000 residential properties on its books. Much of its housing stock was of poor quality; some of its London estates around Paddington were even described as slums. But rather than redevelop its properties to provide better-quality accommodation for working-class residents, the Commissioners, finding they generated low profit margins, simply sold off vast swathes of housing. Ninety acres south-east of Paddington were retained and gentrified; house prices there today are an astonishing £11,000 per square metre. The Bishop’s Avenue, just north of Hampstead Heath, was put on the market by the Church in 1959: today, it’s a byword for empty mansions and offshore billionaires. By the 1970s, the Commissioners retained just a tenth of the housing stock they had first inherited.
To fund the upkeep of the clergy and their ageing buildings – like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Palace on the banks of the Thames – would take more than the usual church roof fund appeals, the Commissioners decided. This hard-nosed approach saw them diversify the Church’s asset portfolio into stocks and shares, and invest instead in commercial property. From the 1950s onwards, they embarked on a string of multi-million-pound redevelopment projects, using their valuable freehold land to build the Angel Centre in Islington, a shopping mall in Birkenhead, and office blocks on the Cartwright Estate near Tottenham Court Road, among other ventures.
Perhaps the biggest moneyspinner of all, however, was the rebuilding of Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s – Church land since medieval times, whose name comes from the Latin for ‘Our Father’, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. In 1986, with the City of London booming in the wake of financial deregulation by Margaret Thatcher’s government, the Church Commissioners sold a 250-year lease on the land to a consortium of property developers. The deal was worth tens of millions to the Church, who also retained the valuable freehold. Goldman Sachs and the London Stock Exchange would later take up residence in Paternoster Square, transforming it from a place where monks once clutched their rosaries into a temple to modern capitalism.
But it wouldn’t be long before the square was filled with the sound of chickens coming home to roost. In the wake of the financial crash of 2008 – the inevitable consequence of City deregulation – Paternoster Square was where the Occupy movement of 2011 first tried to set up camp, before being forced to settle on the steps of St Paul’s. The resulting showdown with the Church authorities saw much soul-searching among the clergy over the Church’s accommodation with capitalism. The Canon of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser, who resigned out of sympathy with the protesters, spoke about the ‘very legitimate anger about the way in which wealth has been distributed and the way in which capitalism is currently seen to benefit just a very few people’. Ownership of land and property, of course, remains central to this chasm of inequality.
To be fair to them, the Church Commissioners have always aspired to wealth redistribution – it’s just that their remit is to redistribute income between the clergy, rather than among society at large. One example is the fact that the Commissioners today own lots of land and property in County Durham and around Newcastle, stretching from the mouth of the Tyne all the way back to the foothills of the North Pennines. The reason is that the area had once been owned by the local bishop as part of the Palatinate of Durham, an ancient institution where the Church held huge sway outside the jurisdiction even of the Crown. For centuries, the bishop of Durham had been the region’s largest and richest landowner. Much of this land was later taken over by the Church Commissioners as part of their efforts to even out some of the inequalities in wealth that had grown up between different branches of the Church, and share out the proceeds from rich bishoprics to poorer ones.
But when it comes to any wider social role, the Commissioners’ efforts seem distinctly limited. For a time, the Church had ownership of the philanthropic Octavia