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Only the colossal earthen bunkers that had housed the Cruise missiles remain standing today. On my visit to Greenham Common one spring evening, I stared across the heath at the brooding bulk of the missile siloes. Their silhouettes resembled a cross between aircraft hangars and Bronze Age burial mounds. But whereas the tumuli that dot Berkshire’s chalk downlands were built to remember the dead as they passed into the afterlife, these structures seemed to me to be far more nihilistic: monuments to Mutually Assured Destruction. Up close, the silos appeared even more malevolent. Still shrouded by three lines of fencing, some of it topped by razor wire, they squatted: ziggurats of grassed-over concrete with thick bulkhead doors, defended by menacing MOD signs. THIS IS A PROHIBITED PLACE WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT, read one. UNAUTHORISED PERSONS ENTERING THIS AREA MAY BE ARRESTED AND PROSECUTED.
I patrolled the perimeter of the bunkers, thinking about the peace protesters who’d performed a Situationist rite during the Vietnam War to levitate the Pentagon. Here and there, I was gratified to see, were signs of where the Greenham Women had graffitied slogans onto the concrete fenceposts and cut holes in the fencing. To my disappointment, all of them had been repaired, making easy access to the site impossible. But nature is now slowly doing the job once performed by the protesters. In one place, a silver birch had grown through and around the fence, and was tearing it apart.
It’s not just the military who enclose common land and public space, of course. In West Berkshire, as elsewhere across the country, the main culprits are big private landowners. I saw this plainly when I decided to return to the county for a few days’ hiking one winter. The Berkshire countryside, beautiful though it is, is also stuffed full of PRIVATE – KEEP OUT signs, letting errant commoners know that the real owners of the landscape would rather you weren’t in it.
In some places, the influence of big estates permeates entire villages: a reminder that for a sizeable slice of rural England, feudalism has never died. That much seemed obvious when one freezing December afternoon I walked into the tiny village of Yattendon, on the edge of the Yattendon Estate. Acquired by the media mogul Baron Iliffe in the 1920s, the 8,295-acre estate has reshaped the area’s countryside with its vast conifer plantations. It sells 80,000 Christmas trees each festive season.
As I skirted around iced puddles, I noticed something odd about the village. Everything looked the same. All the doors, gates and windowsills in Yattendon were painted in the estate’s official dark green, as uniform as the serried ranks of saplings planted in the surrounding fields. Even the telephone box – that staple of quaint old English villages, maintained for tourist selfies long after the landline has been ripped out by vandals – was Yattendon green, rather than the traditional red. The village’s noticeboard, proudly displaying a plaque for the award of Best Kept Village of the Year 1974, presented neatly typed minutes from the latest parish council meeting. Out of the grand total of five attendees, they recorded, one had been a representative of the Yattendon Estate. It was hard to shake the sense that, behind the scenes, order was being maintained by some decorous yet shadowy patrician operating out of the Big House on the hill, like something out of the movie Hot Fuzz.
But it isn’t merely the colour scheme of villages that landowners have sway over. They also control access to large swathes of the countryside. A ‘Right to Roam’ was established by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in the year 2000, but open-access land still only makes up around 10 per cent of England and Wales – a far cry from the situation in Scotland, where the right to roam is now established as the default – and much of that is mountain and moorland. Down south, the countryside is far less open to ramblers. ‘Less than 1.5 percent of West Berkshire, for example, is covered, and many of its glorious woodlands remain inaccessible to the large population of London and the Thames valley,’ notes Marion Shoard, whose tireless campaigning helped bring about Right to Roam. These tiny scraps of accessible woods include Snelsmore Common and Pen Wood – both of which were cut through by the Newbury bypass – and parts of Greenham Common, which had been closed off to the public for decades because of the airbase. So even these fragments of open-access land have been shut off or defiled by some of the county’s major landowners.
The efforts of large landowners to keep people off their estates have, however, proved their undoing when it comes to uncovering what they own.
I was inspired to try to map who owned my home county by the work of John McEwen, who pioneered studies of Scottish land ownership in the 1970s. McEwen set out to find who owned his native Perthshire, but it ended up taking him four years to map just the one county. Fortunately, I discovered a shortcut, and it was all thanks to the territorial behaviour of the landowners themselves.
Under an obscure clause, Section 31(6), of the otherwise extremely boring Highways Act 1980, landowners can prevent new public rights of way from being established across their land by lodging a statement with the local authority. The deposited statements usually last for twenty years, meaning that any public use of the land during this period will not then count towards determining new rights of way. But to protect their interests in this fashion, landowners also have to submit a map delineating the boundaries of their estates. This is then usually published by the council online, or is accessible under the Freedom of Information Act. Possessive landowners are thus hoist by their own petard.
It was this documentation that I was able to draw upon to discover who owns my home county. West Berkshire Council, it turned out, had a remarkably complete set of landowner deposits. I requested they send me their maps in a digital format, to make analysis easier. Combining these with information from a number of other sources, the jigsaw began to fit together. The results astonished me: it was now that I discovered that almost half the county was owned by just thirty landowners.
Their identities offer a telling insight into the landowning elite of modern England. Baronial estates owned by the same aristocratic families for centuries sit next to stately piles snapped up by newly moneyed businessmen (and it is nearly always men), organic farms, and horse-racing studs registered in the Cayman Islands. The aforementioned newspaper magnate Baron Iliffe and property mogul Sir Richard Sutton jostle for landowning supremacy with H&M chairman Stefan Persson, Formula One racing legend Frank Williams, and three scions of the wealthy Astor family.
But the single biggest landowner in West Berkshire is Richard Benyon MP. Benyon is the inheritor of the 12,000-acre Englefield Estate; the palatial, turreted Englefield House has belonged to his family since the eighteenth century.
Today, Benyon is the richest MP in Parliament, with an estimated fortune of £110 million. One tranche of this comes from the East India Company; another stems from property, through the development of De Beauvoir Town in the London Borough of Hackney in the nineteenth century. Richard Benyon still owns De Beauvoir today, via the Englefield Estate Trust Corporation, with the Berkshire connection commemorated in the name of Englefield Road. In 2014, his company courted controversy when it took a minority stake in a consortium that bought the New Era housing estate in Hoxton. The consortium threatened to hike rents on the estate, leading Hackney Council to warn of ‘enforced homelessness’ for nearly half of the ninety-three households living there. When the community rallied in protest, and were joined by comedian-turned-activist Russell Brand, Benyon’s firm was forced to back down and sell