The motley crew of Dickensian characters scale the giant wooden stile and, cheering, breach the spiked fences and thickly hedged defences of Cadogan Square Gardens in Knightsbridge, London. An ersatz Scrooge scolds a mock Oliver Twist, who hoists up a sign reading: “Please Sir, Can I Have Some More?”
Usually accessible only with fobs and keys, the garden is lovely. But who would know that? Apart from the protesters, no one is there. There is no one enjoying the ornamental beds, exotic plants or sweeping lawns. No one is looking at the sculptures, squaring off on the tennis court or walking through the “pollinator meadow”. It’s Sunday afternoon but there are no children in the playground.
It’s no coincidence that the 7.4 acres of rural idyll is empty. Those who own the surrounding properties live far away because these houses aren’t homes: this is one of the UK’s trophy postcodes, largely owned or leased by a global elite of billionaire tycoons and the English aristocracy. Action on Empty Homes has identified such properties as “buy-to-leave”: mansions bought and left empty to store capital, using the UK’s prime real estate literally as a bank.
It’s far from just a London issue: the campaign group behind Sunday’s protest, Right to Roam, want to highlight the extreme disparities in land ownership of our urban green spaces that prevail across Britain and what they say is its radical impact on all our lives, whether in the form of access to housing or access to nature.
“It is a system which is often invisible in our political conversation, and yet influences almost everything in our society,” said Jon Moses, the group’s national organiser.
The group is calling for public access to the private parks and green spaces, which they say should serve as a shared asset for all the UK’s city residents, by expanding the right to roam legislation and bringing the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 to our actual doorsteps.
To achieve this, Right to Roam suggest local authorities make access a condition of the payments received by many large landowners from the public purse. “We already have examples of such provisions being used as a negative relief,” said Moses. “For example, inheritance tax breaks in exchange for ‘permissive access’ to private land on large estates.”
Many of the UK’s cities are incredibly green. Half of London is classed as green or blue space but only 18% of that is publicly accessible. 21% of London households have no garden, compared with 12% across the UK, and only half of Londoners live within 400 metres of their nearest formally designated local open space.
Because of the murky nature of the Land Registry and the web of anonymous landowning companies located in foreign tax havens, land ownership in England is almost impossible to pin down. But Caroline Lucas MP said the issue needed to be addressed.
“A shamefully small proportion of urban green space in the UK is publicly accessible,” she said. “Instead, much of it is currently the locked and bolted preserve of the mega-wealthy absentee elite. This is further entrenching inequality, particularly for people on lower incomes and people of colour, who already live in the country’s most nature-poor communities.”
Lucas pointed out that we saw clearly in the pandemic how important nature is to people’s mental and physical health, and how so many living in urban areas across the UK struggled with a chronic lack of access. Black people in England, for example, are four times less likely than white people to have outdoor space at home.
“Urban access to nature and the health benefits it brings shouldn’t be for the privileged few,” said Lucas. “It’s time to open up our urban natural spaces for the benefit of all.”
Labour proposed an urban right to roam in its Land for the Many report in 2019: the first time such an idea had been proposed. Anna Minton, the author of Ground Control, said it wouldn’t take much to change the status quo.
“We could very easily legislate to say that all open spaces in the city are governed simply by the law of the land – both national law and the normal local authority bylaws, which are transparent and drawn up through democratic processes – and not by special, secret restrictions established by companies that vary from place to place,” she said.
Brett Christophers, the author of The New Enclosure, said the argument for the status quo was unsustainable: “Private landowners have long demanded local government sell off their public land if it’s unused,” he said. “So how is it acceptable for private landowners to sit and not use their assets in a useful or socially productive way?
• This article was amended on 12 December 2022. An earlier version said incorrectly that black people in England are four times less likely than white people to have no outdoor space at home. They are four times less likely to have outdoor space.
