‘Who Owns Cambridge?’ Guy Shrubsole talk will help you find out

Author and environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole, who is in town to deliver a talk titled ‘Who Owns Cambridge?’ on October 12, has a mission to empower people to find out who owns the land in England and Wales.

Speaking ahead of the event, Guy describes land ownership in this country as “a deep dark secret… a bit of a taboo”.

“The very idea of owning land is in itself a strange one,” he says. “The idea of total ownership throws up interesting questions about belonging, and the Earth. The question now is how do we invest nature with rights? When Friends of the River Cam made their Declaration of the Rights of the Cam, that means they’re thinking about how to contend with owners in and around and next to the land beside the river, because there’s lots of concerns about sewage, about the lack of investment in storm drains, and about disposal systems.

“Lots of sewage actually comes off farmland, for instance slurry and fertiliser which, when it rains, leads to very high nitrate levels and algae blooms killing fish. Ultimately the people who own the land next to the Cam have a responsibility as well, so this is a new area where people can put pressure on those who own land next to it.”

To do that you’ll need to familiarise yourself with how the Land Registry – the government body for registering land – works. Or doesn’t work.

“The Land Registry, though set up in 1862, still hasn’t registered all the land in England and Wales,” Guy explains. “15 per cent of the land is still unregistered – we don’t know who owns it – and you have to pay £3 to get access to every title for the other 85 per cent. There are 24m land titles that have been registered, so that’s £72m for all the titles, which is quite a lot of money. The tools are very shoddy, and if you want to look into it you have to get very geeky with data, which means looking at GIS – graphic information system – mapping...

“That’s not the approach I’ve been taking, though I have paid out over the years. What I’ve ended up doing for England and specifically Cambridgeshire is to firstly download a set of files from the Land Registry site which allows you to see the boundaries – it’s not showing ownership, it’s just a map of parcels of land.”

The fact is, you need to turn detective to find out who owns the land in this and every other county.

“A clause says if landowners want to prevent a right of way claim to their land they can do but have to deposit a map of their estate with the local authority and pay a small fee,” Guy says. “So every authority has a set of maps on their website, whether it’s a county council or a unitary authority. Cambridgeshire County Council has one and I’ve downloaded that and it gives us quite a good picture of land ownership overall. It shows lots and lots of parcels of land, and ownership.”

Most of the land is owned by the Colleges in and around Cambridge, though?

“Obviously the colleges, like Trinity and Gonville & Caius, own a fair bit but it’s all sorts – it’s also the Church Commissioners; the Ministry of Defence; Lord De Ramsay, owner of the Abbots Ripton Estate; the Thurlow Estate, owned by the wealthy Vestey family (who made their fortunes in the international meat trade); and the Mormon Church, who bought up farmland in Cambridgeshire in the 1990s.”

Newmarket has “loads of very wealthy ownership including land owned by people of Middle Eastern provenance, Mormon estates, and the Duke of Sutherland…There’s also NGOs like the National Trust, plus the Ministry of Defence with various RAF bases. The question with the River Cam is an interesting one – can you own a river?”

Guy lives in Totnes, he’s half Cornish, on his mother’s side. He’s lived in Wales, New Zealand, London, and worked for the Department of Environment as a civil servant, then Friends of the Earth and, more recently, Rewilding Britain. He is now a freelance campaigner, and author. Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back was published by Harper Collins in 2019, and proved a huge success. Next up is The Lost Rain Forests of Britain, which will be published, also by HarperCollins, later this year.

“It describes the lost rain forest, scattered up and down the West Coast of Britain,” Guy says. “It’s in Wales, on the West Coast of Scotland, and in Cornwall and the West Country. It’s been cut down a lot in the last few years and there’s now a mission to restore it.”

The online event on Wednesday is hosted by Friends of the River Cam.

“So I’d like to set up a Who Owns Cambridge? group,” Guy says, adding: “There’s a Who Owns Norfolk? and a Who Owns Oxford? group, both have websites which are locally run. There’s so much to map and investigate, and I won’t be able to do it all unless the government releases all the information. Meantime citizen science is the way forward on this and on many environmental issues, such as river pollution issues.”

‘Who Owns Cambridge?’ is a free-to-register online event on October 12, 7-9pm.