Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population
Research by author reveals corporations and aristocrats are the biggest landowners
Rob Evans
Wed 17 Apr 2019 20.29 BST Last modified on Thu 18 Apr 2019 00.50 BST
Half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population, according to new data shared with the Guardian that seeks to penetrate the secrecy that has traditionally surrounded land ownership.
The findings, described as astonishingly unequal, suggest that about 25,000 landowners typically members of the aristocracy and corporations have control of half of the country.
The figures show that if the land were distributed evenly across the entire population, each person would have almost an acre an area roughly the size of Parliament Square in central London.
Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson.
While land has long been concentrated in the hands of a small number of owners, precise information about property ownership has been notoriously hard to access. But a combination of the development of digital maps and data as well as pressure from campaigners has made it possible to assemble the shocking statistics.
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Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author