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TThat motley crew of Dickensian characters scaled the massive wooden stile and breached the densely fenced and hedged defenses of Cadogan Square Gardens in Knightsbridge, London. An ersatz Scrooge scolds a caricatured Oliver Twist, who holds up a sign that reads: “May I have more, please, sir?”
Usually accessible only with fobs and keys, the garden is beautiful. But who knows? Apart from the opponents, there are none. No one enjoys ornamental beds, exotic plants or a shrubby lawn. No one is looking at the sculptures, jogging on the tennis court or walking through the “pollen”. It’s Sunday afternoon but there are no children on the playground.
It is no coincidence that the 7.4 acres of countryside is vacant. Those who own surrounding properties stay away because these houses are not houses: this is one of the UK’s trophy postcodes, mostly owned or rented by the global elite of billionaire tycoons and the English aristocracy. A crackdown on empty homes has identified such properties as “buy-to-leave”: mansions bought and left empty to accumulate capital, literally using the UK’s prime real estate as a bank.
It’s far from just a London issue: Right to Rome, the campaign group behind Sunday’s protests, wants to highlight the stark inequality in land ownership of our urban green spaces that exists across Britain and what they say is a radical impact on our lives, whether it’s access to housing or not. Either in the form of access to nature.
“It’s a system that’s often invisible in our political conversation, and yet it influences almost everything in our society,” said John Moses, the group’s national organizer.
The group is calling for public access to private parks and green spaces, which they say should serve as a shared asset for all UK city dwellers, by expanding the law of walking and bringing the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 to our real doors.
To achieve this, Right to Rome suggests that local authorities access the terms of payments received from the public purse by many large landowners. “We already have examples of such provisions being used as negative relief,” Moses said. “For example, exempt inheritance tax in exchange for ‘permission access’ to private land on large estates.”
Many cities in the UK are incredibly green. Half of London is classified as a green or blue space but only 18% of it is publicly accessible. 21% of London households have no garden, compared to 12% across the UK, and just over half of Londoners live within 400 meters of their nearest formally designated local open space.
Due to the murky nature of the Land Registry and the web of anonymous land ownership companies located in foreign tax havens, it is almost impossible to pin down land ownership in England. But Caroline Lucas MP said the issue needed attention.
“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 exacerbating inequality, especially for low-income people and people of color, who already live in some of the nation’s most nature-poor communities. “
Lucas pointed out that we saw clearly in the epidemic how important nature is to people’s mental and physical health and how many people living in urban areas of the UK struggle with a severe lack of access. For example, black people in England are four times less likely than white people to have no outdoor space at home.
“Urban access to nature and the health benefits it brings shouldn’t be for a privileged few,” Lucas said. “It’s time to open up our urban natural spaces for the benefit of all.”
Labor proposed an urban right to roam its land for several reports in 2019: the first time such an idea had been proposed. Ground Control author Anna Minton said it won’t take long to change the status quo.
“We could very easily legislate to say that all open spaces in the city are governed solely by the law of the land – both national law and general local authority bylaws, which are transparent and guided by democratic processes – and not by companies, specifically. Established secret restrictions that vary from place to place,” she said.
Brett Christophers, author of The New Enclosure, said the argument for the status quo was unsustainable: “Private landowners have long demanded that local government sell their public land if it is unusable,” he said. “So how is it acceptable for private landowners to sit back and not use their property in a useful or socially productive way?
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