Land access rights in England are wrong
Around 92% of land in England is off-limits to the general public and where rights of way do exist, cyclists can only ride around 20% of them.
We deserve better access to our own country. And to get it we will have to tackle hundreds of years of injustice.
Centuries ago there used to be lots of common land where local people had a right to graze animals and grow food. Then came the enclosure movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, in which land belonging to everyone was confiscated by the aristocracy. These lines from an 18th century folk poem sum up the brazen double-standards of this legalised theft:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The descendants of those land-confiscating villains continue to profit from enclosure. As author Nick Hayes points out in The Book of Trespass, half of England is owned by just 36,000 people. That’s less than 1% of the population. And much of the land has been in the same families for generations. Over half a million acres of England are now owned by offshore companies – to avoid capital gains and inheritance taxes.
What about rights of way? Don’t they allow us to access some of this land for leisure even if we can no longer all graze our sheep there? Well, yes and no. Hayes points out that today there are roughly 118,000 miles of public footpaths in England. That sounds like a lot, but it’s half what there were a hundred years ago. And cyclists only have access to around 20% of the rights of way network – on bridleways, byways and permissive paths.