Who Owns England?

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 Hill Estates, a set of social housing developments across London let out to low-income households for fair rents. Yet low profit margins prompted the Commissioners to dispose even of these in 2011, selling them off in a move that led one local MP to accuse the Church Commissioners of ‘putting profit before people’. ‘The sleepy old Church of England is a greedy, money-grubbing property tycoon,’ spits the journalist Harry Mount, arguing that a ruthless commercialism belies its otherwise affable reputation. Professor Chris Hamnett castigates the Church’s outlook as being one of ‘philanthropy at 5 per cent’: ‘While the Church Commissioners engage in a limited amount of what might be termed “social investment”, their activities in this sphere are marginal to their major objective of income growth.’

One upcoming test of whether the Church venerates morals above Mammon will be whether it makes use of its extensive mineral rights to profiteer from fracking. In recent years, the Commissioners have been busily laying claim to 585,000 acres of underground deposits of stone, metals and minerals. The Church has explained, reasonably enough, that it’s simply re-registering ancient rights as part of an updating process mandated by the Land Registry, and that it has few active plans to exploit such rights with new mines or quarries. But with ongoing efforts by shale gas companies to frack across large swathes of northern England, there are fears the Church could seek to cash in. Rights to oil and gas were nationalised long ago, but the Commissioners could still profit by charging companies wanting to drill through mineral layers belonging to the Church. And though the C of E has divested itself of all investments in coal and tar sands, citing climate-change concerns, it still argues that fracking can be ‘morally acceptable’ if properly regulated. In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking.[fn3]

The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it?

It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land. Lastly, it should work closely with councils to earmark land for affordable housing, and stipulate that a decent percentage of its land be sold cheaply, at existing use value. At a time when church pews are emptier than ever, the Church needs urgently to engage in some more soul-searching, and show that it retains a social role in modern England.

Old institutions die hard, especially in a conservative country like England. Long after the Crown and Church lost most of their formal powers, they continue to hold sway – kept alive, in part, by their landed wealth. Understanding how these archaic, quasi-feudal pillars of the Establishment operate is crucial to grasping the nature of power in modern Britain, and critical to comprehending why land ownership in England remains so unequal.

The efforts of the Duchies and the Church to evade full scrutiny by Parliament and the public tell us something profound about how privilege tries to perpetuate itself. And the way that both Crown and Church have avoided trying to disclose their landholdings is telling, too: because the concealment of wealth from prying eyes is also critical to preserving it.

These ancient organisations have survived into the modern world by transforming their landed estates from medieval baronies into capitalist property portfolios while still trying to avoid public accountability and wider social responsibility. Some would like to see the Anglican Church disestablished, and the monarchy abolished outright. Personally, I’m ambivalent about that. But on the question of the land they own, it’s clear that the estates of the Crown and Church ought to be made to better serve the public interest.

Most of all, the Crown and Church still matter because of the wider Establishment they helped to create. Without William the Conqueror’s division of conquered lands to his loyal barons, and without the Church’s tacit moral blessing for this unequal hierarchy, England would have no landed elite.

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