Arts, Faculty of
Geography, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Pojuner, Isabella
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Since the 19th century, national debates surrounding the English land question have both declined and narrowed in scope. In this thesis, I survey academic and independent research into the contemporary political economy of land in Britain. Finding these contributions are institutionally constrained, I turn to examine the broader political economy of knowledge production since the English enclosure movement. The development of land registration infrastructure, associated surveying practices, and uses and disciplining of ‘trespass’ each have consequences for customary, collective, and institutional memory. Who owns land? Who can access it? Who defines the land question? These are related concerns. I coordinate these consequences and concerns into the concept of epistemic enclosure. In light of the initial breadth and subsequent decline of the English land question, I analyse Right to Roam, a national campaign for greater land access rights. Rooted in a breadth of discursive contributions to the land question, it mobilises public support by organising mass and local acts of civil, intentional trespass. As it aims to transform English property culture, I characterise Right to Roam as a relational rather than recreational access campaign, in part because it exercises a memory of dispossession in England and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I give an account of four trespasses I participated in from 2022-2023. These trespasses act as spaces to engage with the English land question and develop responsible relationships to land. Deploying the critical cartographic method of mental sketch mapping with participants in trespass, I demonstrate the method itself performs property relations. Alongside acts of trespass, it enables participants to address their ‘mindwall’, or relationship to performances of private property, and reinscribe collective memory of land relations in enclosed space. In doing so, they trace terra incognita through trespass, mapping epistemic enclosure at the scale of the individual body. Closing with preliminary recommendations for policymakers and campaigners, this thesis contributes to the critical silence that is the English land question.
THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, AND HOW TRESPASSERS MAP EPISTEMIC ENCLOSURE by Isabella Pojuner BSc Government and History, London School of Economics, 2020 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2024 © Isabella Pojuner 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: The English land question, and how trespassers map epistemic enclosure submitted by Isabella Pojuner in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography Examining Committee: Dr. Trevor Barnes, Professor, Department of Geography, UBC Supervisor Dr. Priti Narayan, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Since the 19th century, national debates surrounding the English land question have both declined and narrowed in scope. In this thesis, I survey academic and independent research into the contemporary political economy of land in Britain. Finding these contributions are institutionally constrained, I turn to examine the broader political economy of knowledge production since the English enclosure movement. The development of land registration infrastructure, associated surveying practices, and uses and disciplining of ‘trespass’ each have consequences for customary, collective, and institutional memory. Who owns land? Who can access it? Who defines the land question? These are related concerns. I coordinate these consequences and concerns into the concept of epistemic enclosure. In light of the initial breadth and subsequent decline of the English land question, I analyse Right to Roam, a national campaign for greater land access rights. Rooted in a breadth of discursive contributions to the land question, it mobilises public support by organising mass and local acts of civil, intentional trespass. As it aims to transform English property culture, I characterise Right to Roam as a relational rather than recreational access campaign, in part because it exercises a memory of dispossession in England and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I give an account of four trespasses I participated in from 2022-2023. These trespasses act as spaces to engage with the English land question and develop responsible relationships to land. Deploying the critical cartographic method of mental sketch mapping with participants in trespass, I demonstrate the method itself performs property relations. Alongside acts of trespass, it enables participants to address their ‘mindwall’, or relationship to performances of private property, and reinscribe collective memory of land relations in enclosed space. In doing so, they trace terra incognita through trespass, mapping epistemic enclosure at the scale of the individual body. Closing with preliminary recommendations for policymakers and campaigners, this thesis contributes to the critical silence that is the English land question. iv Lay summary Who owns land in England is one of its most closely guarded secrets, receiving limited attention from economic geographers in recent years. This thesis investigates the reasons behind this secrecy, reviewing the limited research and historical record. It explores how enclosure — a form of dispossession — is remembered and resisted in contemporary England. Right to Roam, a land rights campaign, contributes research to this end and has made the politics of land more visible to the British public, in part by organising intentional trespasses that hold all land users more accountable. I argue trespass, as well as land registration and mapping practices, help us better understand land dispossession in England, and therefore specify the political economy of Britain. After analysing the work of Right to Roam from 2020-2024, I interview ‘trespassers’ using the mental sketch mapping method. This helps represent their experiences, revealing the ‘terra incognita’ of enclosed land. v Preface This thesis is the original, unpublished and independent work of Isabella Pojuner. Fieldwork data was collected by Isabella Pojuner and covered by UBC’s Behavioural Research Ethics Board (certificate # H22-01740-A004, “Epistemic enclosure”) vi Table of contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iii Lay summary ............................................................................................................................ iv Preface ........................................................................................................................................ v Table of contents ...................................................................................................................... vi List of figures ............................................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... x Dedication ................................................................................................................................ xii Chapter 1: Encountering enclosure ........................................................................................ 1 1.1. Representing property .......................................................................................... 3 1.2. The muddy affairs of land .................................................................................... 4 1.3. Enclosure is continuously performed .................................................................. 5 1.4. The amnesic force of enclosure .......................................................................... 12 1.5. Remembering Dartmoor .................................................................................... 13 1.6. Mapping epistemic enclosure with trespassers in England ............................ 14 Chapter 2: The English land question .................................................................................. 17 2.1. Its initial decline .................................................................................................. 17 2.2. A critical silence .................................................................................................. 19 2.2.1. Capital and Land ............................................................................................... 20 2.2.2. The New Enclosure ........................................................................................... 26 2.3. Land registration as infrastructure ................................................................... 31 2.3.1. Who produces land ownership data? ................................................................ 32 2.3.1.1. Who Owns Britain? .................................................................................. 33 vii 2.3.1.2. Who Owns England? ............................................................................... 36 2.3.2. How is land registration infrastructure produced? ............................................ 41 2.3.2.1. Looking back ........................................................................................... 42 2.3.2.2. And looking elsewhere ............................................................................ 45 2.3.2.3. Mapping memory ..................................................................................... 47 2.4. Defining customary practice .............................................................................. 50 2.3.1. What is custom? ................................................................................................ 51 2.3.2. Who holds customary knowledge? ................................................................... 55 2.3.3. The ‘enclosure’ of knowledge ............................................................... 64 2.3.4. Knowledge as a fictitious commodity ..................................................................... 67 2.5. Epistemic enclosure ............................................................................................ 69 Chapter 3: The trespassers ’answer ...................................................................................... 74 3.1. Introducing Right to Roam ................................................................................ 76 3.2. Performative and conjunctural analysis ........................................................... 77 3.3. More than manifestos ......................................................................................... 80 3.3.1. Debunking lies of the land ................................................................................ 81 3.3.2. Writing trespass ................................................................................................ 83 3.4. A single-issue campaign? .................................................................................... 88 3.4.1. Who trespasses? ................................................................................................ 93 3.5. At what scale? .................................................................................................... 100 3.5.1. National ........................................................................................................... 100 3.5.2. Local ............................................................................................................... 103 3.5.3. Dartmoor ......................................................................................................... 109 viii 3.5.3. All the world’s a stage .................................................................................... 117 Chapter 4: Tracing terra incognita through trespass ....................................................... 126 4.1. Botany Unbound ............................................................................................... 130 4.2. Know Your Rights (and how to map) While Trespassing ............................ 135 4.2.1. The psychological barrier ............................................................................... 135 4.2.2. Mental sketch mapping as post-representational ............................................ 139 4.2.3. As partial and processual ................................................................................ 142 4.2.4. As performative .............................................................................................. 144 4.3. Mapping unknown lands .................................................................................. 149 4.3.1. The soft recce .................................................................................................. 149 4.3.2. The hard recce ................................................................................................. 150 4.3.3. A day of trespass ............................................................................................. 153 4.4. Tracing terra incognita ..................................................................................... 157 4.4.1. Approach ......................................................................................................... 157 4.4.2. Retracing routes .............................................................................................. 159 4.4.3. The ‘moment’ of trespass ................................................................................ 172 4.4.4. The scale of trespass ....................................................................................... 177 4.4.5. Tracing terra incognita in the English land question ...................................... 180 4.5. Towards memory work .................................................................................... 186 Chapter 5: Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 188 References .............................................................................................................................. 195 Appendix ................................................................................................................................ 212 ix List of figures Figure 1 Locations with a parliamentary enclosure in England and Wales between c.1700 and 1911................................................................................................................................................. 7 Figure 2 The pattern of landownership in Great Britain ............................................................... 24 Figure 3 Caroline’s mental sketch map ...................................................................................... 161 Figure 4 Nigel's mental sketch map ............................................................................................ 162 Figure 5 Second page of Nigel's mental sketch map .................................................................. 163 Figure 6 Paul's second mental sketch map .................................................................................. 164 Figure 7 Tom's mental sketch map ............................................................................................. 165 x Acknowledgements Thank you to the Musqueam people, whose lands have been the place of this research. Land Back is the only way forward. Thank you to my supervisor Trevor Barnes for this life-changing opportunity, and every subsequent opportunity you have given me to better my scholarship. Thank you to my second reader Priti Narayan for your critical contributions, care, and confidence in me. Thank you to Samuel Burgum, Lily Demet, Catherine MacLean, Rachael Milliner, and Taha Vostakolaei, with whom I have walked many worlds written here. Ačiū Gabrielė Dumpys Woolever, who introduced me to life on this land. Lithuanian Social Club forever! Thank you to my other housemates Amy, Lili, June, Marijose, Rebecca, Rutu and Ryan for laughter, parties, and nourishing food. To fellow grads Porter Abbey, Yardain Amron, Rachel Bok, Judee Burr, Will Booker, Holly Chubb, Max Cohen, Joe Daniels, Peter de Montmollin, Gillian Der, Nick Gandolfo-Lucia, Clea Harrison, Simen Hennum, Brandon Hillier, Audrey Irvine-Broque, Nico Jimenez, Emi Kingan, Chris Meulbroek, Maggie O’Donnell, Varun Panickar, Poorna Patange, Rachel Phillips, Erik Post, Cal Quinn, Prashant Rayaprolu, Chris Reimer, Erika Siao, Iñari Sosa Aranda, Rachel Stern and Gabby Wolf for constructive dialogue, generous support, and many happy memories. A special thank you to María Cervantes Macías for outstanding mentorship, friendship, and lifelong lessons about work and rest. Thank you to all who hosted me during fieldwork: to Harriet in Bristol; Cat, Charan, David, Indrė, Isaac, Tara and Tom in London; Dylan and Ieva in Manchester; Andy in Plymouth; and Jarv, Warren and Zoë in Stoke-on-Trent. Through your generous hospitality and stimulating conversations I have come to see England anew. Thank you to staff at countless libraries, especially Vancouver Public Library, the Institute of Historical Research, the Internet Archive, xi LSE Library, the Manchester Working Class Movement Library, Manchester Central Library, and the Sheffield Local Studies Library, which dutifully maintains and make accessible the stories of local ‘trespassers’. I have happy memories of my dad, who helped me take notes from the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers’ handbooks after my accident. During my hiatus back home, I wound up with a collective purpose. Alanna, Aska, Fran, Ged, Lucy, Peter, Rachael, the House of Annetta and its resident Cat: I wonder if anyone could be as lucky as me to have found you and Perpetual Stew. I credit much of my education to those in the Land Justice Spring Gathering hosted by Shared Assets; the Sheffield encampment, the Colonial Lives reading group, and all I met with Sam Burgum through Narrow Margins at Leeds GATE and Streets Kitchen. Sadia Sheeraz and Colin Vanelli made me feel this was all possible. My department provided funding and teaching opportunities: from both I have been able to continue learning. Thank you to Aaron, Danny, Mary and Sandy for your endless support; Trevor Barnes, Luke Bergmann, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis for engaging research projects; and Alec Blair, Loch Brown, Desirée Valadares and Elvin Wyly for your pedagogical training. For your time, guidance and teaching: Alex Baker, Rae Baker, Leonard Baker, Brenna Bhandar, Nick Blomley, Christabel Buchanan, Brett Christophers, Maria Fernandez Garcia, James Fisher, Anna Jurkevics, Jon Moses, Elsa Noterman, Jamie Peck, Nadia Shaikh, Guy Shrubsole, Juanita Sundberg, Jess Turtle, Matt Turtle, and Mark Walton. Thank you to all I have ‘trespassed’ with. It has been a pleasure to write about some of you within the confines of this research. A particular thanks to one of you who recommended The Blindboy Podcast. Blindboy’s storytelling not only accompanied me during this journey but validated much of my research practice. Finally, thank you to the reader. This gave me great joy. xii Dedication I dedicate this work to my beautiful family, who I can always count on for their grace, humour, and folk. Thank you to my dad, whose stories raised me to imagine, and whose critical yet positive worldview is inspiring. Aciū mamyte už tuos grybus, kuriuos tu surinkai is miškų. Regėdama tai kaip tu džiaugeisi as užaugau. Your resilience has taught me so much. It is also dedicated to ‘trespassers’ around the world who built encampments in solidarity with Palestinians, and their ongoing struggle for life and homeland. 1 Chapter 1: Encountering enclosure The cartographer says no — What I do is science. I show the earth as it is, without bias. I never fall in love. I never get involved with the muddy affairs of land. Too much passion unsteadies the hand. I aim to show the full of a place in just a glance. — Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries To Map A Way To Zion Dartmoor, a national park in Devon, England, is one of my many homes. I grew up on its eastern edge, and when I was a young teenager spent every other weekend training on its tempestuous terrain for the Ten Tors expedition. A retired geography teacher called Mr Parker taught us how to navigate the moor; its waves of purple heather and undercurrents of granite forged by a long-extinct volcano. Given Dartmoor’s unpredictable micro-climate, wayfinding can be a challenge. One morning, my friends and I began up Kitty Tor in pleasant weather, only to summit realising ourselves in a dense fog. I could barely make out an outstretched hand, let alone the landmarks I was relying on. Bringing my map and compass close to my face, I led with my gut and walked with my chest forward, and over time, learned to read the landscape as an invitation to learn Dartmoor’s many folkways. I understand why people spend decades in the area, passing on its folk stories to the next generation. Ten Tors is a youth outdoor education programme that depends on park-wide rights of use enjoyed by the public. Unlike national parks in many other countries, all thirteen in England and Wales are privately owned, farmed, and home to humans as well as other 2 life.1 Established by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, they are managed by national park authorities (NPAs), legal bodies with a primary responsibility to both conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of parks; and promote “opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of those Parks by the public” (Environment Act 1995). The Commoners’ Council has similar and overlapping responsibilities, including the maintenance of public access to the commons for the purpose of open-air recreation (Dartmoor Commons Act 1985). While Dartmoor in particular is used for military practice, certain rights to use it are held in common. Regardless of whether a certain landowner, be it a small farmer or the Ministry of Defence, owns a particular piece of land, what governs its lawful use is not their word alone, but constant negotiations between owners, users, and the various authorities that represent their overlapping and contested interests. As a teenager, I was somewhat aware of these everyday negotiations. For us to camp in more restricted areas of the park, I remember Mr Parker calling authorities unbeknownst to us to give advance notice. Under the logic of exclusive private property exercised outside of the moor, perhaps we would have to ask permission; to pay; or perhaps we would not have access at all. Here, ‘land’ included all of us. For better or worse, the boundaries that distinguished our navigation from military practice were not written in the uplands through hedges and fences. Neither was a casual Sunday walk, or birthday picnics hosted by friends. I could not have then imagined a world without the ability to camp under the stars and exchange folk stories. Looking back, I can’t remember the feeling of putting our right to camp in doubt. If anything, I can’t remember feeling like I was exercising a right at all. 1 Scotland’s two national parks — Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, and the Cairngorms — were established by distinct legislation from the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. Further, “Scotland has no common land as we understand it in England and Wales” (Hoskins and Stamp 1963 xvi). 3 1.1. Representing property Property rights are highly specific to a place and its people, and some scholars have tried to work out models to explain them. In the ‘ownership model’, property rights are understood as permanently given to a single owner and protected by their land title. The owner can exercise complete control, excluding and disciplining others through the delineation of boundaries over ‘what is mine and what is yours’. However, this model is an abstraction, in the sense that it ignores the interests of non-owners, the reality of co-existence, and the changing environment — as I experienced on Dartmoor. Progressive property scholars, such as Joseph William Singer, have critiqued the ownership model. They understand property as a bundle of different rights exercised in relation to objects, including the right to enforce boundaries, to exclude others from using it, and even to destroy it. “Property is about rights over things and the people who have those rights are called owners,” Singer famously wrote (2000 2). Nicholas Blomley, a legal geographer, has critiqued this conclusion about the nature of property. Blomley argues not all property rights are private. This is more explanatory of places like Dartmoor, where, thanks to longstanding local customs and laws, I could camp on the moor without owning a single part of it. We live in a world with different, diverse and heterogeneous interests in property, reflecting variations in geography and social relations. Blomley argues the language we use to describe property matters. Indeed, Singer’s premise, in conflating property with the ownership model, places us into a dichotomous position: either we treat private property as socially constructed and not ‘real’, or deny its disciplinary power. There is a third way, and it involves digging deeper. 4 1.2. The muddy affairs of land We may suppose that property forms are unyielding and absolute but an examination of property’s history reveals strikingly different possibilities. — Nicholas Blomley (2013 29) In September 2019, I was about to start my final year of my undergraduate degree. When I first encountered the English land question on a random Thursday, my head was filled with logistics for a climate strike the next day, the biggest in British history. After a year of ‘Fridays for Futures’, I had learned the route from university down to Parliament Square so well I could walk it backwards, my movements automatic, amongst peers who shared my concerns. How on earth did we get here? It was a question I felt I’d been asking for too long. My unsatisfactory answer was that industrialisation was responsible for this great mess we had inherited. All the way to Parliament Square, I would carry an image in my head of smoggy Manchester — the “heart of the Industrial Revolution”, as my dad would say — not far from the cover of my copy of The Condition of the Working Class in England. This Friday was different. The day before, I’d gone to a talk at the Barbican about the climate emergency. I remember a brightly coloured map projected on the big screen, representing the most comprehensive and public dataset of land ownership in England and Wales. The man on stage told us half of England’s land mass is owned by 1% of the population, and at least 30% is owned by the aristocracy, the largest landowning group in society.2 How was that still possible? The Land Registry doesn’t know who owns 17% of land in England and Wales. And how does the government (!) not know? Walking to Whitehall that Friday, my head was filled with the English land question — an incredibly broad set of overlapping issues, discourses and 2 The aristocracy are a class of landowners who inherit their titles, traditionally synonymous with titles to land. In contrast to this group, 18% of UK land is owned by companies; 17% by private, non-aristocratic landowners; 12.4% is owned by the public sector, the Crown, the Church and charities; 5% is owned by homeowners; and 3% in held in common (Shrubsole 2019). 5 debates concerning land ownership, distribution, use and rights. I had never linked these concerns to the processes of industrialisation, imperialism, and colonisation I had studied at university. Why did I not know about this before? Led by land reformers, the land question debates peaked in the 1840s and 1870s, and by 1914, historians argue, “the great land question simply fizzled out” (Thompson 2010 257). In the hands of a few, the discourses and the underlying issues have of course persisted, but they never quite gleaned the breadth of debate and popular engagement once wielded (Thompson 2010). In this contribution, I explore some of the reasons why. Despite its breadth and decline in English political discourse, the English land question has been re-emerging anew in recent years, in part due to the concerted labour of researchers and campaigners. Guy Shrubsole, the speaker I saw on stage that evening, is one of them. His research has exposed the concentration of land ownership in England to be one of the highest in the world, and his campaign he co-founded reinscribes a memory of the English enclosure movement, which formalised the concept of private property as we know it today. 1.3. Enclosure is continuously performed To enclose is not simply to draw a boundary around a piece of land and call it ‘mine, not yours’. Through enclosure, the use rights to land held by others are also extinguished: prevented from being exercised through legal and illegal means. Those rights are interred in a single owner and often backed by an exclusive title to land. While piecemeal or informal acts of enclosure began in the 13th century, legal or formal acts of enclosure reached their apex during the English enclosure movement in the 18th and 19th centuries. 6 Approximately 5,000 Enclosure Acts passed by Parliament from 1604 to 1914 — the same year by which FML Thompson claims the English land question “fizzled out”. With the English enclosure movement, heterogeneous interests in property expressed through common property rights were spatialised into private property boundaries and deemed exclusive. This process was highly variegated across England and Wales (see Figure 1). In 1600, an estimated 27-30% of England was still common land (Clark and Clark 2001); over the English enclosure movement, a fifth of England’s land mass was enclosed (Shrubsole 2019); and by 1873, just 5.2% of England was held in common, according to the Return of Owners of Land, the most accurate land survey in British history (Aitchison et al. 2000). Today, “[c]ommons are only 3% of England but comprise 21% of England’s Sites of Special Scientific Interest by area and 39% of all open access land,” much of this upland areas such as Dartmoor (Aglionby 2022). Enclosure is not a ‘natural’ process, but enacted over and over, performed, both instantiating and maintaining private property relations. 7 Figure 1 Locations with a parliamentary enclosure in England and Wales between c.1700 and 1911 Figure 1. Locations with a parliamentary enclosure in England and Wales between c.1700 and 1911. Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Sources: W. E. Tate and M. E. Turner, A Domesday of English Enclosure. Acts and Awards; John Chapman, Guide to Parliamentary Enclosure in Wales; and Roger J. P. Kain, John Chapman, and Richard R. Oliver, The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595-1918. 8 In his critique of Singer, Blomley looks back to early examples of enclosure, arguing “property does not pre-exist its performances.” (Blomley 2013 33) A hedge is one example of such a performance. In demarcating parcels of land and enrolling in parliamentary acts of enclosure, to construct a hedge was an attempt to discipline new property boundaries and simultaneously extinguish common rights held in the land.3 Such enactments make private property ‘real’. Unlike the ownership model, or the progressive property approach, Blomley’s performative analysis understands these hedges as surfaces from which to perform a heterogeneous or multiple, diverse property rights. Acts of hedge-making by landowners and enclosure commissioners enacted private property, while acts of hedge-breaking by commoners maintained common property. The question remains, how has property become synonymous with private property? In contrast to progressive property scholars, Blomley’s performative analysis also shows representations of the world do not have to be accurate so much as ‘felicitous’. Certain conceptions of property are dominant, on this view, because of their ability to enrol resources and arrange other representations. In so doing, they can help constitute a world in which they become true. Not all performances are successful, it would seem. Tracing how this is so becomes an urgent analytical task. (Blomley 2013 34) Performativity theory is helpful because it centres the relations between agents, human or otherwise (Callon and Law 1995). For instance, by using particularly resilient species such as hawthorn, hedges were symbolic and material at once, making it more difficult for commoners to assert their rights to land (Blomley 2007). A single performance is ‘felicitous’, or successful, if relations “can be persuaded to continue performing together” in order to stabilise a given entity — this persuasion and stabilisation is understood as enrolment (Barnes 2008 1434). 3 Some rights of common include: the right of estovers, to collect enough windfall wood for personal use; the right of pannage, to graze your pigs for those who lived near beechwoods; the right of turbary, to dig the earth for peat, using to heat homes; the right of piscary, to fish stocks in common land; the right of brakes, to cut down bracken for livestock bedding; the right to glean, to pick up leftover harvest; the right of shack, to let livestock feed on leftover harvest; the right of ferae naturae, the right to hunt wild animals on the common. Uses of land under these rights were monitored within the common, with collective responsibility. (Hayes 2022 77) 9 To make and remake property, then, takes work. To turn things into property according to the terms of the ownership model, or according to alternative “models” — requires sustained and citational labour. (Blomley 2013 36-37) All property relations are performed through this work. What seems to make performances of private property felicitous is that, by disciplining forms of use and excluding others from use, they can “produce the appearance of resolution, simplicity, order, certainty and security.” (Blomley 2013 38) Once a hedge was enrolled in an Enclosure Act passed by the state parliament, it stabilised — quite literally. As common rights were extinguished and the hedges were left intact, the land it enclosed was no longer viewed as a commons, but as a commodity to be exchanged in land and property markets. It is no coincidence that this enclosure and commodification of land preceded the Industrial Revolution. In Capital Volume I, Karl Marx gives an account and analysis of the Enclosure Acts, “decrees by which the landowners grant themselves the peoples’ land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people.” (Volume I Chapter 27) He argues “the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Volume I Chapter 26) If these expressions read familiar, it is because they are frequently referenced in subsequent accounts of primitive accumulation, and later, accounts of capital accumulation. Marx also writes that by “the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the communal property had, of course, vanished.” (Volume I Chapter 27) In comparison, his reference to memory in this account is rarely treated as significant. Marx’s description of the English enclosure movement is that of dispossession, enabling accumulation, but understood with the third quote, it is also clearly a description of people’s changing relationship to land. To be in relation to land is to have a kind of knowledge of it; a loss of memory is a loss of connection. The labour to make industrial Manchester work was possible because workers, many former commoners, were denied the ability to exercise their 10 interests in property through exclusionary, disciplinary and amnesic force that removed and disconnected them from it. They were compelled to make a living in increasingly industrial cities, participating in industrialisation.4 It was also possible because of entangled processes of colonial dispossession across the British Empire, which feature in Blomley’s work on the politics of property in Vancouver: If colonial possession was dependent upon dispossession, the survey serves as a form of organized forgetting […] through which a space of imagined emptiness is sequentially filled with European entitlements. Absent from these maps, of course, are prior entitlements, as well as the “ongoing processes of regulation, dispossession, containment, and resistance.” (Blomley 2003 128, my emphasis) I argue there was an organised forgetting at work in England too: Property law and property institutions, like land titles offices, help organize and police memory in particular ways, opening up certain memories and closing others. Titling does not just record, in that sense, it also arbitrates. Property more generally is a site for storytelling that also helps organize memory and make it meaningful. (Blomley 2018 xv) Indeed, I focus on England in part because its property institutions and culture appear to have had a particularly amnesic effect, relative to other spaces of dispossession with which it is intimately entwined and bears responsibilities, such as neighbouring Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, 4 They were also denigrated for their ways of life, as contemporary writer on agriculture Timothy Nourse typefied in 1700: “Our Forrests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.” (Nourse 1700 in Griffin 2023 106) 11 and of course throughout Africa, Asia, and the Americas.56 Greater comparative work is needed across memory cultures to specify England. What is very clear from historical research is that, over centuries and, through colonial dispossession, across countries, performances of private property have not only drawn up boundaries and land titles to say ‘this is mine’, and excluded others through laws of trespass to say ‘this is not yours’, but have asserted their permanence, order, and resolution. The “concept of exclusive property in land” was “extending across the whole globe, like a coinage reducing all things to a common measure”, “carried across the Atlantic, to the Indian sub-continent, and into the South Pacific, by British colonists, administrators, and lawyers." (Thompson 1991 164; 175) To simply glance at these acts is “to overlook the dense networks of meaning, violence, record-keeping, and sedimented history that make such performances possible.” (Blomley 2013 37) If property is a “site of memory” (Blomley 2018 xv citing Peñalver 2011), memory is an archive of its performances. To understand the English land question, I argue, we must specify the amnesic force of dispossession in England. We must get stuck in the mud. 5 In Scotland, a “folk memory” of the Highland Clearances looms large over contemporary debates over land (Wightman 2010 57). In Ireland, the land question was synonymous with recent independence from Britain, entangled with memory of the Famine, the exclusionary feudal system and the Penal Laws, and thus land reforms that sought to formalise the land titles of smallholders were justified on grounds of social justice (Walsh and Fox-O’Mahony 2018). In contrast, the Land Registration and Law of Property Acts 1925 applied to England and Wales were justified through discourses of free trade in land, efficiency, and stronger private property rights. While the 1922 and 1937 Constitutions in Ireland constituted a ‘post-colonial’ ideological revolution in forming national property ideologies, the 1925 Acts applied to England and Wales should be understood as a conveyancing revolution managed by the political classes and legal professionals, with no substantive popular engagement (Walsh and Fox-O’Mahony, 2018). Therefore, while the legal establishment of Ireland addressed popular support for land redistribution, land reforms in England and Wales were increasingly separated from the violence of land dispossession. And despite increasingly capitalist discourses justifying the 1925 Acts, the concentration of aristocratic land ownership has persisted within land registration infrastructure until the present. 6 While England and Wales share a legal regime, I cannot claim experience or knowledge of land relations in Wales, and barring Who Owns Cymru, an exciting project to map land ownership in the country, I only have scope in this thesis to skim the surface of land relations in England. A helpful comparative study of the ‘land question’ in Wales, Republic of Ireland and Scotland has been conducted by David Howell (2013). It otherwise remains terra incognita to me, perhaps reflecting the centralising power of Westminster on my perception of land relations. 12 1.4. The amnesic force of enclosure [W]e know relatively little about common right, and less about commoners, and even that is disputed among historians. There are many reasons, but one of them is a failure of the imagination. For good reason: imagining something that has disappeared is difficult; after all loss is loss. (Neeson 1993 1-2) When Jean Neeson’s Commoners was published in 1993, it would transform historians’ understanding of social life in eighteenth century England (Thompson 1991). The book excavates traces of commoners’ memories from a variety of primary sources, conscious and critical that these records themselves acted as the infrastructure for acts of enclosure. [T]he evidence of peasant economy comes indirectly. It is implied in the field orders of customary courts, which show the survival and protection of common right, and in the Land Tax returns, which show the survival of small peasant landholding in common-field villages. It is clearer in the resistance of commoners to enclosure on the grounds that they would lose their cows, their lands and their wastes, though the complete map of their resistance will never be drawn. It is implied again in the inventory of useful products found on uncultivated common and waste, and again in the stubborn memory of roast beef and milk and the swift disappearance of both from labourers’ diets after enclosure. It is described most directly in the work of pamphleteers, writers to the Board of Agriculture, and guilt-ridden improvers. (Neeson 1993 11, my emphasis) In another landmark contribution to the history of the commons, Customs in Common, EP Thompson demonstrates further relationship between institutional memory and customary practice. As common rights began to be extinguished, associated customary practices soon followed. The commons and wastes shrank, in the nineteenth century, to the village greens (if such survived) and communally-shared custom shrank to the ‘calendar customs’ and survivals collected by the folklorists. (Thompson 1991 182) Yet there was more opposition to enclosure than used to be supposed. […] Enclosure protests were rarely reported in central administrative archives or in London newspapers; they did not take the form of regional ‘uprisings’, highly visible and tumultuous. (Thompson 1991 116) While these records helped perform acts of enclosure, the reflexive and recursive reading of historians like Neeson and Thompson help us remember the commons. While a complete map of 13 will never be drawn, what we do know is that commoners drew upon common right by exercising customary practices. In one sense, custom was local culture, in another sense, it had legal effect, a “rigorous, detailed, and precise corpus of local law”, despite being informal (Everett 1990 224). Custom was constituted by “unwritten beliefs, sociological norms and usages asserted in practice”; spatialised in land relations held in common; and dependent on the continual renewal of oral transmission across generations making it “difficult to recover” (Thompson 1991 100). “We shall not ever return to a pre-capitalist human nature, yet a reminder of its alternative needs, expectations and codes may renew our sense of nature’s range of possibilities,” writes Thompson (1991 15). To access the memory of the commons, at moments of enclosure, is not to feign nostalgia, but perform a heterogeneity of relations through remembering. 1.5. Remembering Dartmoor Our camps on Dartmoor had been negotiated amongst many parties, according to longstanding relationships with, and localised knowledge of, the land. But I only realised it was a commons — that Dartmoor was the only place in England and Wales with an informal right to ‘wild’ camp — when a landowner attempted to extinguish this right.7 Bringing his case to the High Court in 2022, financier and landowner Alexander Darwall argued camping did not fall under the right of ‘open air recreation’ protected by the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985. In response, the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) argued for generations of Ten Tors teenagers.8 But in January 2023, the English legal system performed private property by ruling in his favour. 7 By 1895, almost half of Dartmoor’s common land by acts of enclosure, known as the ‘Commons of Devon’, had been enclosed (Hoskins and Stamp 1963). 8 As aptly put by its organisers, the Ten Tors program is “firmly established in the collective consciousness of the South West. All those who attempt Ten Tors will undoubtedly remember it for the rest of their lives and for many it will be a life-changing experience.” (Tens Tors website) 14 Darwall’s act of enclosure enabled his commodification of land. Negotiations turned into compensations for landowners, with the DNPA using taxpayer money to buy public permissions to camp. Soon after, I returned to Dartmoor to join the largest land protest in England for 100 years. We rallied against the decision and invoked one of Dartmoor’s folk tales, ‘Old Crockern’. By this tale, it is said that a rich man moved to Dartmoor from Manchester and enclosed the land around Crockern Tor. A local man reported a vision that Old Crockern, a guardian spirit of the moor, was as angry as the community at this enclosure and had cursed the landowner, declaring: ‘If he scratches my back, I’ll tear out his pocket.’ In the end, the landowner’s attempts at ‘improvement’ proved futile, and he returned to Manchester, destitute. In invoking this folktale, the rally challenged the notion of exclusive property and reflected localised use. As a giant, handmade, haunting puppet of Old Crockern breezed past me, and I was surrounded by others who had also come to see Dartmoor as their home, I wondered whether I understood a little of how it felt to be a commoner during the English enclosure movement, faced with the loss of so many rights fundamental to their ways of life. With images of Old Crockern enrolled in national newspaper coverage, this was a visible case of enclosure in contemporary England. Could it help revive national debates around the English land question? 1.6. Mapping epistemic enclosure with trespassers in England In this thesis, I posit that the English land question is shaped by how property relations are performed over time, and therefore remembered. I focus on how acts of intentional trespass reveal and therefore undermine the ‘organised forgettings’ that enable the enclosure and commodification of land in England. I contribute the concept of epistemic enclosure, a term that has oriented me 15 throughout my research. The enclosure of land — in extinguishing customary rights held in common — is epistemic, constraining the use, knowledge, and memory of enclosed land enabled through rights of access. By trespassing, you enter an enclosed space without permission. You are not only able to access information specific to that place, but through your own use of land, realise that private property relations are performed, enabling greater accountability. In the context of ongoing dispossession and environmental collapse, how we relate to land is critical. In Chapter II, I define and explore the English ‘land question’. I demonstrate it has narrowed since its peak in the 19th century, and in light of this, examine its treatment in a literature review of economic geographers and independent researchers, whose research into land ownership is constrained by land registration infrastructure. This knowledge gap reveals ‘organised forgettings’ — institutional constraints that can be explained by longer processes of enclosure and commodification and continue to affect the political economy of knowledge production about land relations today. Following ‘new protest historians’, I posit our understanding of the commodification of land data today should be rooted in the elite denigration and redefinition of land relations and appropriation of customary knowledge, including through title by registration; surveying; laws of trespass, and other forms of institutional memory. The enclosure of knowledge should be understood as co-constitutive with the extinguishment of common rights, as the enclosure of land implicates the transfer of intergenerational knowledge through customary practice. Who defines the English land question defines how we are able to answer it, collectively. This elite definition has been going on for far longer than we may assume at first glance, and requires digging in the mud. In Chapter III, I examine how Right to Roam, a recent land rights campaign, answers the English land question at its local, national and international scales. Co-founded by Guy Shrubsole, 16 the campaign is significant because of its national platform and broad-based approach, with which it not only lobbies the government for a comprehensive right of access over England and Wales, but actively encourages the public to engage with the politics of land and reconnect to enclosed land through intentional acts of trespass. Due to the scope of its discourses and interest in decommodifying land relations, I characterise Right to Roam as a relational access campaign, broader in scope than campaigns for recreational access, housing rights or racial justice. Drawing on performative and conjunctural analysis, I contextualise the campaign’s strategy in the breadth and decline of the English land question, demonstrate the constraints the broader land justice movement faces. In the Conclusion, I argue for a programmatic, multiscalar approach to research and land policy in England. In Chapter IV, I examine how property relations can be performed at the scale of the individual. It is an account of four trespasses, including three conducted on the same landed estate from July 2022 to February 2023. I articulate the critical cartographic practice of mental sketch mapping as a suitable method of research into the performance of property relations within enclosed land. Through my facilitation of mental sketch mapping exercises and semi-structured interviews, I show how the trespasses I describe are spaces in which to discuss issues of ownership, access, use, and rights, demonstrating how Right to Roam have facilitated spaces for the public to answer the English land question. The amnesic force of enclosure is partially understood as the production of ‘terra incognita’ within cognitive maps — our embodied systems of navigation that hold spatial memories — reconfiguring our relationships to land. 17 Chapter 2: The English land question What is the ‘land question’? Far from a single issue, the phrase originates in 19th century England as a set of overlapping discourses, debates and “issues concerning the use, distribution and ownership of landed property” (Cragoe and Readman 2010 1). The ‘land question’ is invoked by political economists examining a variety of contexts: there are burgeoning literatures digging into land relations and attempts at land reform in contemporary India, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, West African nations and Zimbabwe. In comparison, the contemporary English land question receives relatively little attention, perhaps reflective of its decline in political discourse over the last century. 2.1. Its initial decline In the 1840s and 1870s, the land question debates were particularly lively, “multifaceted and multivalent, engaging people of all ideological positions, and it was precisely for this reason that it occupied the prominent place it did.” (Cragoe and Readman 2010 15) Almost unimaginable today, the land question was then a "genuinely popular cause, something more than the pet cry of a clique of radical politicians and intellectuals” (Thompson 2010 257). It was by no means a hey day for land reform, but the most concerted attempt. In 1909, Henry George’s so-called ‘People’s Budget’ advanced the most progressive land tax reforms in history, proposing a 20% tax on land-value increases upon land transfer and an increase in death duties. In response, the Lords blocked the budget for the first time in three centuries with a majority of 350-75 (Gilbert 1976). By 1914, “the great land question simply fizzled out”, its characteristic broad-based debates lost their salience (Thompson 2010 257). It has never since returned to this peak of political salience. The onset of the Great War; a major split in the land-reform-toting Liberal Party; and the 18 “contemporary perception of a massive transfer in land” from the aristocracy to other landowners, led to the “strange death” of the land question as it was once understood (Thompson 2010 262; 257). Perhaps in parallel, or perhaps precipitating its decline, the Land Registration and Law of Property Acts of 1925 also facilitated the emergence of the modern property market. In turn, a once broadchurch concern with the high concentration of land ownership turned to the emergence of the welfare state and policies focused on achieving mass home ownership (Quinault, 2010; Monteath 2021). Under Clement Attlee’s post-war government, the Lords successfully lobbied against a comprehensive right to roam, proposed as a corollary to the National Health Service and in response to demands from recent veterans (Hayes 2020). Although vibrant, longstanding debates within and beyond Parliament had not resulted in substantive legislative change: “Indeed it invites the question of how far land reform [in Britain] had ever been relevant beyond its utility as a political cry.” (Thompson 2010 260) Certain politicians and intellectuals made attempts to revive the land question until the mid-century mark, but it had ultimately lost its grip on the hearts and minds of the public, and, steadily, the attention of scholars (Thompson 1965). Once broad, the land question is now exceedingly narrow in scope, if visible at all. In this chapter, I show how contemporary treatments of the English land question remain institutionally constrained and offer an original approach to interrogate these conditions. Beginning with economic geography, which has identified the lack of available land ownership data, I argue the political economy of land in Britain is implicated in the political economy of knowledge production, ultimately turning to independent researchers who are cognisant of this relationship and fill gaps in land ownership data. Taking a historical approach, I trace two aspects of the English land question — land registration infrastructure and customary practices — arguing these demonstrate a co-constitutive relationship between the commodification of land and 19 knowledge. Building on this limited literature, which reflects the narrowing of the English land question, I introduce a conceptual framework appropriate for interrogating the specific political economy of land in England. 2.2. A critical silence In the last 46 years, economic geographers have produced just two major texts on the political economy of land in Britain: Capital and Land by Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano, published in 1978, and The New Enclosure by Brett Christophers, published in 2018. The four decades between these texts saw a significant shift in Britain’s wider political economy. Over 100 years after its apparent ‘death’, Christophers picks up the land question with a vengeance as he investigates the privatisation of land owned by the state. He finds that from 1979 to 2018, 20 million hectares of public land (around 10% of Britain’s land mass) was sold. Worth an estimated £400 billion, this constituted the biggest privatisation in British history. This finding is particularly significant, he argues, because land ownership is not discussed in public life (Christophers 2018b). As he writes, “one of the main aims of [the] book is to show why the land question should never have vanished (or been sidelined) from the political agenda in the first place.” (2018 75) “[A]s well as not having been studied, British land privatization has, for the most part, also not been substantively contested or protested.” (2018 2) To this end, he argues the work of the late geographer Doreen Massey is critical in revealing the relationship between scholarship and political discourse. He points to the gap between their work, from 1978 to 2018, evidencing how the land question has dropped off the political and scholarly map. He also gives a brief history of the land question in his first substantive chapter. In these ways, the land question frames his investigation into the privatisation of public land. 20 He first introduces the land question in the acknowledgements of the book, where he makes a dedication to Doreen Massey and historical geographer Cole Harris and justifies his approach: [Massey] knew just how important land was and is to British society, politics and economy. Nobody since then has written about the political economy of land in Britain with anything approaching her insight or verve. Around the time she stopped writing about land, at the end of the 1970s, the land question largely disappeared, for reasons discussed in this book, from politics and critical scholarship in Britain, and Massey’s work on land faded into the background with it. My book has the modest ambition of putting both the land question and Massey’s analysis back on the political and scholarly map. (Christophers 2018 xvi, my emphasis) To specify the English land question, we must pick it up again. 2.2.1. Capital and Land Although Massey’s research into land ownership would end in the early years of the Thatcher government, questions of property and resources followed throughout her life. In a retrospective, geographer John Pickles speculates her early life in industrial Manchester would have been informed by conflict scarred into the landscape of the Peak District, home to the infamous Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932. The Peaks were a “site for recuperation but also a resource for political mobilization, as generations of worker education programmes had long realized”, and aware of this, Pickles argues, she was able to hold the tension between land ownership across contexts, from the rural to the urban (2018 145). Her persistent although ultimately background concern with landed property in defining the shape of Britain’s political economy is reflected in her contributions to the Kilburn Manifesto, published three years before her death in 2013. Over the past forty years, she argues, the land question narrowed in on foreign investment in land, understood as exacerbating the housing crisis. Yet Massey argues Britain’s specific political economy must be characterised as the long dominance of financial interests 21 coupled with the significance of elite land ownership, “utterly embedded in the British class structure”. Together they “constitute an elite class power related to finance/circulation and to land and property that has waxed and waned, sometimes been challenged, and over time has changed its form”, and therefore, the “‘mess’ we are said to be in is thus deeper, and of longer duration, than is usually assumed.” (Massey and Rustin 2015 116-117) This position begins with Capital and Land in 1978: a monograph co-authored with her colleague Alejandrina Catalano, analysing several years of their joint quantitative research at the Centre of Environmental Studies (CES).9 Harold Wilson’s programme of “scientific socialism”, headed by minister Anthony Crosland, had worked to incorporate the research of social scientists and economic geographers into policy (Pickles 2018). To this end, the CES received £600,000 from the UK government and $750,000 from the US-based Ford Foundation over a five year period (Pickles 2018). But under the Thatcher government, funding of the CES was withdrawn, bringing further programmatic research into land ownership to a halt. This, as Christophers argues, effectively put an end to the land question in critical socio-scientific scholarship, mirroring its decline in political discourse. These were “two domains that fed one another: scholars studied the political economy of land because people cared about it and elections were fought on it; politicians campaigned on landownership because academics showed them how important it was to the economy, society and polity.” (Christophers 2018 328) Situating their research in the early 1970s, Massey and Catalano articulate their concern with not only the unequal concentration of land ownership in Britain, but structural challenges to its study and comprehension in wider political discourses, particularly in the ‘New Left’. Drawing from a short course in theories of rent, theoretically, Capital and Land emerged at a time of increasing engagement with Marxism in geography, particularly with regard to property relations 9 After CES, Catalano exercised her expertise as a journalist examining land and property markets, notably including work at Real Estate Capital Europe. 22 (Heynen, Luke and Keegan 2018). Massey and Catalano forward a typology of ownerships, articulating socio-spatial differences across types of landowning groups — ‘former’ landed property, industrial, financial, and individual private landownership — and arguing this typology would enable an analysis of changes in the form of the capitalist social formation with greater specificity.10 As aforementioned, by the 1970s the land question had been narrowed, shifting from land reform debates focused on the social effects of enclosure and the unequal concentration of land ownership, to intra- and inter-party cleavages around the role of the state in shaping private use and development of land (Christophers 2018). As Massey would later emphasise, a historical approach is ultimately needed to specify Britain’s political economy of land. The land question — a broader public discourse about the possibility of land nationalisation and social effects of unequal or concentrated land ownership — had become the “land problem”, as stated by chancellor Hugh Dalton in 1947, and as referred to by Massey and Catalano in 1978. This referred to the rise of land speculation in Britain’s political economy, and the need for new development taxes to constrain private developers, which Massey and Catalano discuss in great detail in the closing chapters. For Massey and Catalano, this ‘land problem’ reflected the increasing commodification of land, and the inequality of distributing gains between authorities to distribute amongst the public, or to private landowners who concentrate land ownership (Massey and Catalano 1978; Heynen Luke Keegan 2018). Their central argument was that because the rationality or behaviour of the landowner ultimately determines the pattern of land ownership, we must interrogate our assumptions about landowning groups when producing and interpreting land ownership data. Capital and Land is now remembered as prescient in its analysis of financial 10 Each form of ownership, from former landed gentry to emergent financial landowners, is specified through capital appreciation; forms of rental income (as the form of rent has specific effects on accumulation); the condition of production; and the associated effects on the development of the capitalist social formation (Massey and Catalano 1978). 23 landownership at a time where land development was beginning to come under the significant control of financial elites (Walker and Schoenberger 2018). But it is important to point out Massey and Catalano’s explicit audience was the postwar Left, who they argued misunderstood the ways this growth in financial land ownership was structuring broader economic relations, as well as how land politics emerged from difference and uneven development across regional economies. During this period of transition, interrogating the actually-existing rationality of landowners is particularly crucial. Yet despite these changes, the most significant finding derived from their typology does not concern industrial or financial landownership, but the continued material power of the landed aristocracy, and related constraints on their ability to produce data for the land question. This should be of greater interest to economic geographers. Their major quantitative findings are prefaced with the acknowledgement that “The data are extremely inadequate, but this table represents probably the most complete and up-to-date tabulation possible”, a product of “an attempt to combine and cross-check all the most recent existing figures on landownership” (Massey and Catalano 1978 58). 24 Figure 2 The pattern of landownership in Great Britain Figure 2. The pattern of landownership in Great Britain by % acreage (Massey and Catalano 1978 58) Despite the generally assumed break up of private, typically aristocratic estates, they identify the “most significant, and perhaps startling, new conclusion”: “a rough estimate of the holdings of the landed aristocracy, amounts to over 30 percent of the total land area of Great Britain. [...] In spite of the decline which they have undergone during this century, the holdings of the landed aristocracy have by no means been reduced to insignificance.” (Massey and Catalano 1978 60, my emphasis) Despite writing in the 1970s, during significant upheaval with the land and property boom and an injection and retreat of financial capital into the land market, the aristocracy remains the dominant landowning fraction in Britain. How can this be explained? Massey and Catalano provide an answer by way of a related constraint to their research: 25 One of the fundamental problems was a lack of knowledge about the form, nature, and structural relations of land ownership in Britain. (4) …even at a descriptive level, the precise nature and extent of all these changes in the pattern of land ownership has remained little known. Quite basic questions are unanswered, or, if answers exist, they do so in widely-scattered sources. Is the ‘landed aristocracy’ a thing of the past? Do the financial institutions own more than a few key acres? In terms of private individuals, has there really been, as is often implied by phrases such as ‘property-owning democracy’, a general redistribution of land ownership? Not since the 1870s, when there was a survey by the Spectator (1876) and a complete national survey (the New Doomsday Survey of 1873), has there been any form of comprehensive investigation into landownership in this country. Indeed, the degree of privacy and confidentiality of the subject is an indication of its political sensitivity. In the 1873 survey, proposed in order to demonstrate how land was becoming the property of all, in the event only served to emphasise how highly concentrated its ownership still was. (Massey and Catalano 1978 7)11 After Capital and Land, Massey reproduced the findings of this research in a couple of journal articles and a report for the Labour Party, returning to briefly address the English land question in 2013. But their research was ultimately cut short, defunded by the Thatcher government (Christophers 2018). The decline of the land question persisted. Reflecting broader tendencies in political discourse and in the discipline of economic geography, the bulk of her research career tended to focus on socially visible research questions such as labour, using methods that focused on actors and institutions, rather than examining everyday land relations. The lack of land data, as I will show, continues to constrain the land question in scholarship and broader political discourse. It demonstrates the continued need for Massey and Catalano’s approach, which is to analyse the specific land relations that characterise Britain’s ever-changing political economy in spite of these structural constraints. It demands a historical approach to examine and make public the relationship between the decline of the land question and the startling persistence of the landed aristocracy revealed by the available data. It also demands campaigning and researcher for greater 11 The New Doomsday Survey of 1873 is another name for the Return of Owners of Land, which I will soon discuss as part of my analysis of Cahill and Monteath’s contributions to the land question. 26 social visibility of land issues. While Capital and Land is based on Marx’s theory of rent and account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, “still relevant to understanding the origins of certain categories of land ownership in the UK” (Walker and Schoenberger 152), they do not engage with the impact of institutional memory-building resulting from enclosure that I explore later in this chapter. Their work focuses on the pattern of land ownership, an indirect rather than direct approach to the secrecy of land ownership in Britain. I argue scholars need to examine and intervene in a broader political economy of knowledge production, which limits public-facing scholarship, capable of increasing social visibility. 2.2.2. The New Enclosure Published 40 years after Capital and Land, Brett Christophers’ The New Enclosure focuses on the privatisation of public land in Britain since 1979. He frames this contribution with a more explicit concern over the loss of the land question in scholarship and political discourse. Building on Massey and Catalano, he investigates the development of financialised — rather than public interest — rationalities within government discourses in the neoliberal age. These are understood as expressions of ideological enclosure, “justified on the grounds that existing forms of use and ownership are wasteful, and that private use and ownership are more productive.” (Christophers 2018 323) Of particular significance is his chapter on discourses of surplus, which were applied to public land through parliamentary discourse and registers identifying ‘surplus’. Akin to the proliferation of discourses of “waste” during the English enclosure movement, he shows how these discourses enabled public land to be more easily sold or ‘disposed’. The Local Government Planning and Land Act 1980 required designated public bodies to register all sites above an acre, under the broader objectives to ‘dispose’ ‘idle’ land for private development. Thus, a ‘new’ 27 enclosure, that is both material and discursive, performs a culture of private property relations within government: widely — and in the case of land, wrongly — understood to be acting in the public interest. With his research acting as an intervention in this culture, he specifies and re-asserts the meaning of public land ownership — the governance of public land by public institutions. Once a norm, this has lost political salience over the course of successive neoliberal governments, who have forwarded policies including ‘Right to Buy’, responsible for commodifying council-owned housing and land and perpetuating a culture of individual homeownership. The New Enclosure is therefore not only an academic contribution but a call for a political project. Together, he argues, this would be capable of re-establishing the land question in academic and political discourse. I argue it also offers the foundation for intervening in a broader political economy of knowledge production. We can understand Christophers’ particular contribution to the land question through his definition of ‘enclosure’: dependent on the historical account he offers. But this privatisation, the ‘new enclosure’, is distinct from the English enclosure movement because “the core transformation is of ownership rather than access and use rights”: When publicly owned land becomes privately owned land, it is ‘privatized’ in both de jure and de facto senses. When common rights to common land are extinguished, the land is ‘privatized’ in a de facto but not a de jure sense, since ownership does not change. In such instances, the land is today said, in legal terms, to have been ‘deregistered’: the location and area of common land is recorded on commons registers maintained by local authorities; extinction of common rights sees the removal of the land from those registers – hence, deregistration. (2018 12 r1) The enclosure of common rights persists through deregistration, but more broadly, he shows how the rationality of exclusive use now implicates state-owned land. Therefore, Christophers defines enclosure as an ongoing process that precedes and persists through the neoliberal period: [O]ne cannot meaningfully speak of neoliberalism and privatization, or of neoliberalism and enclosure (privatization’s spatial exemplar, if you like), as if they are separate or separable phenomena. [...] [T]here is no ‘neoliberalism’ without privatization/enclosure. 28 The latter is internal and inherent to the former, not something that can externally come into contact, and then intertwine, with it. (2018 19) Explicitly re-engaging debates around access, use, and ownership of land, which must be understood together, Christophers roots his account of the privatisation of public land in a history of the land question. From the peak of the land question in the 1870s to its decline in the 1970s, the British state became a significant landowner, in the sense that public land is governed by public institutions. In the interwar years, as issues of public land ownership took their discursive shape in the form of housing policy, not land reform, state-owned housing increased from 1% to 10% of total housing stock in Britain using compulsory purchase powers. After (most) wartime holdings were relinquished after World War II, the state owned approximately 12-14% of British land, increasing to approximately 20% by the 1970s after a huge post-war programme of asset and land nationalisation, predominantly concentrated in urban areas (Christophers 2018). This enables Christophers to demonstrate the significance of the privatisation of public land, and the outsized impact of discourses of so-called ‘surplus’ land and property targeting the public estate that began in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing from Massey and Catalano, he points out that it is emergence of a financial rationality that starts to define public land ownership and inhibit protest to privatisation: “Britons have not mourned public land ownership because, in many cases, they have not associated it with public benefit; they did not regard the land as genuinely, meaningfully, theirs.” (327) “Thatcher’s genius, conscious or otherwise, was to numb potential opposition to land privatisation by making millions of people — and perhaps those most likely, all other things being equal, to be politically opposed to the programme — its direct individual beneficiaries,” primarily through the Right to Buy policy (328). Just as Neeson illustrates in her account of the English enclosure movement, Christophers shows how the state-led programme of privatisation has an effect on the public’s political and economic imagination. It is the responsibility of researchers to reopen this 29 imagination through public work. Likewise, when Massey and Catalano argued for nationalisation of land, they did so not as "an aim to be fought for as an end in itself […] but in the knowledge that its primary effect will be not to end the struggle over land-related issues, but to change the conditions of that struggle.” (1978 189-190) Given the complexity of land tenure in Britain, we must work on specifying it through historical accounts that better explain the present conjuncture. For instance, the enclosure Christophers is ‘new’ because prior to the 20th century, the British state, as we understand it today, “was not, and had never been, a significant landowner.” (2018 84) Drawing from Kevin Cahill’s analysis of Return of Owners of Land 1873, Christophers points out that while all land in 1873 was owned by 4.5% of the population (Cahill 2001), “the state does not even figure in [his] overall tabulation of the main categories of landowner across Britain as a whole at that time.” (Christophers 2018). By the late 1970s, when Massey and Catalano were conducting their research, the state had accumulated 12-14% of the total land area of Britain. Using their data as a baseline, Christophers is able to conclude that “public landownership was at an all-time high when, in May 1979, Thatcher entered Downing Street” (2), and, critically, that half of that land has been privatized in the years since — constituting 8% of Britain’s land mass and the largest privatization in British history (Christophers 2018b). However, despite higher levels of public ownership in 1978, Massey and Catalano also find that “while the least wealthy have the least access to land, at the other end of spectrum no form of wealth is more heavily concentrated in the hands of the richest individuals”, compared to forms of wealth such as shares, net loans, insurance, chattels, cash and current accounts, and trade assets (1978 11). If anything specifies the political economy of land in Britain, it is the remarkable persistence of a highly concentrated pattern of land ownership, with the landed aristocracy at the helm. Once again, only a historically informed approach to the land 30 question can explain why it has been in decline, and the institutional constraints faced by researchers and political actors today. However fruitful the inheritance of data from Massey, Catalano and Cahill, like them, Christophers faces the constraint of ‘secrecy’ as he investigates the land question. In this case, Christophers is primarily concerned with public land identified as surplus and (still) at risk of sale: One of the reasons that researching the history of land privatization in neoliberal Britain is so tricky is that data are sparse and thin. For a long time, most public bodies did not consistently keep records of what land was sold, to whom, and for how much. Even when they did, they tended not to share the information. (2018 221) Alongside the discursive enclosure Christophers investigates, he finds himself implicated in a larger political economy of knowledge production. It is difficult for him to even measure the financial value of this colossal privatisation, not only because the transfer from public to private ownership was conducted in piecemeal transfers, but because the state has not kept sufficient records of these sales. It was not until the early 2000s that the UK Government began to centrally collect local authority land sale data (Christophers 2018 257). However, an even more continuous constraint to the land question is the enclosure of Land Registry data. As I will elaborate in the next section, this is land ownership data funded by the taxpayer, held by the state, but inaccessible to the public including researchers. Throughout The New Enclosure, Christophers articulates the problem of land ownership data through this relationship between institutional constraints and scholarship: In short, whether due to government incompetence, secrecy, or a combination of both, much about the history of public land disposal in Britain remains behind a cloak of impenetrability.” (222) In the absence of open and comprehensive official data on landownership – a scenario which, in truth, remains some distance off – it has historically fallen to lone researchers to fill in the many yawning gaps. Three individuals have made especially significant contributions since the 1980s: for Britain as a whole, Kevin Cahill; for Scotland, Andy Wightman; and, most recently, for England, Guy Shrubsole. I thank them all profusely for 31 their heroic work of data gathering, compilation and communication, without which this book would not have been possible. (xv-xvi) Christophers uses their independent research to support his intervention in the land question, as the book ultimately aims to “render visible not only the extent of public land that has been lost in Britain, but also — perhaps more importantly — the extent of public land that remains” thus hopefully “skewering the myth that public ownership is by definition wasted or ‘inefficient’ ownership” (Christophers 2018 331). In this powerful use of data, articulated as part of a broader political economy of knowledge production, he builds on Massey’s contribution to the land question. Yet it is crucial to understand Capital and Land as a product of engaged, state-funded and programmatic research into land ownership, totally absent in England today. In their retrospective review, Walker and Schoenberger argue: “If one were to try to update this work, one would still run into a wall of data silence. Property ownership continues to be a taboo subject in terms of published, publicly accessible data. […] This informational black hole is only likely to get worse in the present political conjuncture.” (Walker and Schoenberger 2018 152) Why is it worse today, and why is it difficult to continue this work? There is more to this story than a lack of research funding. As I show in the next section, the extent of land data available to the public has deteriorated since the 1870s. Thus, to answer the English land question, we have to examine land registration infrastructure anew. 2.3. Land registration as infrastructure To specify the political economy of land in Britain requires not only asking who owns land, but how land data is produced. In 2021, sociologist Timothy Monteath offered an extensive answer, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) to treat land registration systems in England and Wales as an “information infrastructure” (2021 2). This approach means he 32 understands registration as an invisible background process, enabling the smooth functioning of land and property markets. His work demonstrates how those who attempt to reveal this process — including through the production of land ownership data — provide us insights into the interactions between land registration infrastructure and the decline of the land question. Land registration is just one facet of a much broader land question and political economy of knowledge production. However, its development in England offers a clear case of how the commodification of land through its enclosure, privatisation and circulation in land and property markets, is entangled with the commodification of knowledge, in the treatment of land data as a commodity for sale — as well as the underlying infrastructure’s obfuscation of other non-proprietary land relations over time. This section surveys treatments of land registration infrastructure, first in contemporary England, and second in its development since the sixteenth century, even prior to parliamentary enclosure. I show how this infrastructure not only serves to commodify land, but forms of knowledge about land relations, which I go on to discuss. 2.3.1. Who produces land ownership data? As Christophers remarks, without Andy Wightman, Kevin Cahill and Guy Shrubsole, his work in The New Enclosure would not have been possible. In their respective books, Who Owns Scotland/The Poor Had No Lawyers, Who Owns Britain and Who Owns England, they assess the pattern of land ownership in Britain, making outsized contributions to the land question in research and political discourse. In this section, I focus on Cahill and Shrubsole’s contributions, as their work interacts with the Land Registry of England and Wales. Alongside their data contributions, they examine major institutional constraints to the land question as part of polemic accounts grounded in meticulous historical research. Both help us specify the political economy of land in England, its changing shape, and the continuity of aristocratic land ownership. 33 2.3.1.1. Who Owns Britain? Published in 2001, Who Owns Britain by Kevin Cahill is a landmark contribution to land ownership data across the British Isles. As a journalist, Cahill was assigned to investigate the assets of the British aristocracy for the first Sunday Times Rich List.12 A product of 10 years investigating the proportion of land ownership in Britain, Who Owns Britain excavates the Return of Owners of Land of 1872, the most comprehensive and accurate survey of land ownership in British history, and argues for its revival in national memory. The Return demonstrates the stark deterioration in public land ownership data. By this time, universal male suffrage had not yet been achieved. Yet land titles for 95% of Britain were accessible to the public, with just 3 million acres unaccounted for. As Cahill shows, “in the last 125 years access to information about the ownership of land has retreated rather than advanced.” (2001 29) Published during the second peak of the English land question, the Return was initially dismissed as inaccurate by major landowners in parliament, who claimed to be concerned about the tax implications that could result. Thorough corrections were made in John Bateman’s Acreocracy published shortly after, but these were buried in political discourse (Cragoe and Readman 2010). Once widely available for purchase at around £70 in today’s money, the Return was dropped by publishers. Since, the county records it drew from have suffered damage, been dispersed and become inaccessible, making contemporary versions impossible. Despite this material deterioration, Cahill uses the Return to trace present ownership of a third of England and Wales, and his work explicitly situates contemporary land politics within a loss of memory surrounding land registration infrastructure over time. Working from this premise, the book is split 12 “It was in pursuit of the wealth of the latter, mostly in the form of land, that I discovered the gap in the Land Registry, and the total absence of any accurate information at all as to who actually owned our four countries.” (2001 xii) 34 into historical narrative and a breakdown of ownership in the UK and Ireland, including major landowners in each county. Who Owns Britain is therefore a major source of data for The New Enclosure, accounting for statistics on the historic loss of common land, as well as to construct Christophers’ own data demonstrating the impact of the privatisation of public land with the necessary historical context, particularly the acquisition of military land by the state. 13 Christophers draws on Cahill, and Massey and Catalano, to discuss the dominance and continued political power of the aristocracy despite such fluctuations in other forms of land ownership. According to Cahill, ‘more than a third’ of all British land was ‘still in the hands of aristocrats and traditional landed gentry’ as recently as 2010. In the late 1970s, the proportion must have been somewhat higher yet, perhaps between 35 and 40 per cent – certainly more than half, at any rate, of the approximately 60 per cent of British land owned by private individuals of all types. (Christophers 2018 116) Writing in 2001, Cahill was optimistic that reforms under Blair would break up the power of the aristocracy. He argued the House of Lords Act 1999, which limited hereditary lords in the chamber to 92 seats, was “the only truly revolutionary act of the Blair government” (2001 27). Writing 17 years later, Christophers questions how revolutionary this could have been, as “power and land are still tightly bound to one another in Britain” (Christophers 2018 74). Although Cahill’s predictions were optimistic, he did recognise this entanglement, and thus specifies Britain’s political economy as did Massey: the “ruling elite who own the land have been successful in selling the concept of a 'joint interest' between landowners and the landless” (Cahill 2001 27). He traces the development of this joint interest, emboldened by land registration infrastructure, in a historical account of several “great land grabs”, beginning with the Domesday Book in 1086 and notably, including the expansion of the British Empire. However, while the oft-memorialised Domesday Book was no 13 From the 1870s to 1945, defense land surged from 67,000 hectares to an all-time-high of 4,655,200: 20% of Britain’s land mass. This, Christophers argues, set the precedent for Britain’s “enlarged portfolio” of public land to be slashed from the 1980s onward. (Christophers 2018 91) 35 “more than 5% accurate as to the legitimate owners of land in England” and obfuscated differential and contested forms of land relations that existed in 1086, he estimates the Return was between 90% to 95% accurate (Cahill 2001 21). Since the Domesday Book, such surveys have denied heterogeneous relations to land beyond forms of ownership validated through consecutive surveys. The crux of the problem, particularly borne out in the 150 years following the Return, is a decline in accurate registration systems, coupled with the denial of different relations to land beyond the forms of ownership validated and enrolled in these surveys. Due to this deterioration, Cahill’s lists are drawn directly from the Returns and Bateman’s later corrections in the Acreocracy, but they cannot be as accurate or verifiable. “As such, they demonstrate the extent to which the country has moved from almost total enlightenment in matters of landownership to almost total ignorance,” an issue of significant state responsibility and public concern (2001 356). Rooted in such historical accounts, both Cahill and Guy Shrubsole illuminate important institutional constraints enacted by the Land Registry today. First, the data it holds is not open, meaning it is not available to anyone to “freely access, use, modify and share for any purpose” (Open Definition, Open Knowledge 2024). Under a system of title by registration, the Land Registry charges for individual access per land title, offering subscriptions primarily exercised by solicitors and real estate agencies. In 2019, Shrubsole estimated that to gain access to all titles held by the Land Registry — 86% of the total land area in England and Wales — would cost £72 million, at a price of £3 per land title compared to around £70 for the Return published in 1873 (Shrubsole 2019; Cahill 2001). But in December 2024, this increased to £7 per title, scaling the total cost to £168 million (Land Registry website, accessed December 10 2024). Of course, once a hypothetical £168 million was handed over, many title 36 records would become outdated immediately upon sale. While the Land Registry is a government agency, it does not work in the public interest of knowledge — transparency and accountability of major landowners to the public. Instead, it operates to facilitate land transfers and the functioning of the land and property market. Second, the Land Registry itself is constrained in its ability to provide land data. For context, over the last 30 years, major reforms such as the Land Registration Acts of 1997, 2002 and 2012 have enabled new ‘triggers’ for registration. In a 2017 report titled ‘Fixing our broken housing market’, the Registry stated its aim for a more open and digital register and “comprehensive registration by 2030”, using these triggers to support its work (Department for Communities and Local Government 2017). Indeed, while in 2004, just 40% of England and Wales was registered, the Registry can now account for an impressive 85%. Yet there remains a revealing bulwark to its 2030 goal. Four years after the Land Registration Act 1997, which extended compulsory registrations to a number of previous exemptions, including deeds of gift, Cahill wrote “there is still no requirement in law to register land in which no transactions have taken place”. (Cahill 2001 401) Despite almost 30 years of reform and registration work, this remains true. 2.3.1.2. Who Owns England? During his stint as a forest campaigner at Friends of the Earth, in 2016 Guy Shrubsole established Who Owns England, an online investigation, blog and mapping project — work also chronicled and developed in a book of the same name published in 2019. The investigation is by no means sole-authored, and much credit should be given to data journalist Anna Powell-Smith who contributed to the blog, built its land ownership map, and with whom Shrubsole has 37 collaborated on a map focusing on gaps in the Land Registry totalling 15% of Britain’s land mass.14 Although it builds on Cahill and Wightman, as well as predecessors Massey and Catalano, Marion Shoard and John McEwen, the contributions of Who Owns England is demarcated by the introduction of digital mapping technologies and the growth of GIS from the 1990s, as well as the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) and Freedom of Information (FOI) laws in 2004/5. Unlike Cahill, Shrubsole is therefore in a position to make accessible new data through exercising these laws, as well as make visible the serious lack of public data. Drawing heavily on these sources, the Who Owns England map is now the most comprehensive public dataset on contemporary land ownership in England and Wales. One major finding Shrubsole reports is that half of England is owned by 25,000 landowners — accounting for less than 1% of the overall population. In addition to his estimates on aristocratic landownership, he finds that approximately 18% of UK land is owned by companies; 17% by private, non-aristocratic landowners; 12.4% is owned by the public sector, the Crown, the Church and charities; 5% is owned by homeowners; and 3% of land is held in common (Shrubsole, 2019). Christophers draws on the investigation extensively, citing its findings on the extent of ownership by the aristocracy, water companies, Whitehall, RSPB, the Forestry Commission and various companies; in addition to his valuation of the government estate using public data: £229bn in 2016. Still, Shrubsole’s work remains significantly constrained. While he places greatest statistical confidence in data pertaining to the public sector, central and local government, universities, and conservation charities, he admits declining confidence in limited companies and limited liability partnerships, the Crown and 14 Her work has also revealed that, between summer 2017 and April 2018, £100 million worth of public land was sold to companies registered in tax havens, many UK-based developers (Powell Smith 2018). The Who Owns England investigation appears to also receive open-source contributions, encouraging readers to contribute their findings using a variety of data points—however any made are not attributed online. Since Who Owns England, Who Owns Cymru and more localised projects such as Who Owns Norfolk, Oxford, Middleton, Manchester and Sheffield have also been established. 38 Church of England, and, unsurprisingly, the aristocracy.15 By others’ estimates of aristocratic land ownership, he primarily refers to Massey and Catalano’s estimate of 31.6% by “Great Private Estates”, and the last dedicated survey of aristocratic land ownership conducted by journalist Roy Perrott in 1967, finding approximately 30%. However, as the investigation acknowledges, the availability and quality of data is seriously constrained until the Land Registry is opened up, and the custom of primogeniture is made a trigger for registration (Shrubsole 2019 87; Powell-Smith 2019). First, like most individuals and organisations, he is unable to afford the £168 million it would cost to access current Land Registry data. Second, while the Land Registry can now account for an impressive 85% of land in part due to the recent introduction of compulsory registration to all land, 15% remains unregistered. This is no archaic concern: land registration facilitates not only greater transparency and conveyancing, but also the environmental management and development of land (Powell-Smith 2019).16 This stark omission is possible because these lands have not passed hands, so to speak. As the Land Registry itself says, “[m]uch of the land owned by the Crown, the aristocracy, and the Church has not been registered, because it has never been sold” (Hookway, 2018). This does not mean it has not been transferred. The aristocracy practice a type of informal or customary land transfer called primogeniture: the patrilineal transfer of property rights under 15 The Church and its estates are not subject to FOI laws: another gap in the map. However, Shrubsole, in collaboration with Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson, published an investigation revealing there has been a reduction in glebe land since the 1873 Return: from 2.13m acres, to 112k in 1976, and just 70k today (Shrubsole 2019 66). 16 Further, as Powell-Smith argues: “Although imposing registration can be problematic in countries with undocumented land use patterns, this is not the case in England & Wales. All land here already has an owner in law.” (Powell-Smith 2019) 39 trust from father to the closest male kin, typically the first-born son.1718 This transfer is not yet subject to registration, and as I will explore shortly, this is quite deliberate and further specifies England’s political economy. While 12.4% is owned by the public sector, the Crown, the Church and charities, Shrubsole concludes that at least 30% but possibly up to 47% of land in England in Wales is owned by the aristocracy, a figure he is able to draw because of the Land Registry’s aim for comprehensive registration has whittled down a lot of uncertainty since the publication of Who Owns Britain. Still, like Massey, he writes, “who once observed that the secrecy surrounding land ownership was ‘an indication of its political sensitivity’”, his work in Who Owns England is concerned with this gap in knowledge, and is therefore a kind of “trespass through England’s green and pleasant land” (Shrubsole 2019 1). The informal practice of primogeniture is not only a likely cause for the the missing 15% of data, Shrubsole finds, but the persistence of aristocratic ownership and the joint interest model at the heart of the British state, specifying England’s mixed political economy (Shrubsole 2019). Therefore, unlike his forebears, Shrubsole explicitly attempts to examine contemporary aristocratic land ownership since Thatcher’s government within the context of a generalised landowning elite that now includes financiers. For instance, he describes the significance of chancellor Nigel Lawson’s move to replace capital transfer tax with a new inheritance tax in 1986, which abolished taxation of lifetime gifts and granted agricultural land relief. 17 There is an interesting case which explores gender variance in relation to primogeniture. In 1968, Sir Ewan Forbes, a trans man, inherited the baronetcy of his elder brother Lord William Sempill on Sempill’s death, despite a challenge by his cousin who argued his re-registration as a man was illegitimate. The Court of Session ruled him intersex and the Home Secretary recognised his claim. After five decades of suppression by the Scottish government, in 1998 researcher and policy adviser Zoe Playdon was granted access to the legal records of the case, granted by Home Secretary Michael Howard (Playdon 2021). The case is not able to be used as legal precedent. 18 Primogeniture does govern succession to the throne, but since the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 is no longer patrilineal, removing all preference for male successors. Also, unlike the aristocratic custom of primogeniture, primogeniture exercised in determining succession to the throne was formalised in the Act of Settlement 1701. 40 Shrubsole’s broader project and contribution to the land question aims towards greater transparency and accountability for landowners. From Who Owns England to his most recent book, The Lie of the Land, Shrubsole argues the persistence of the aristocracy rests in convincing the public of their role as guardians of heritage, allying with governments pledging to cut taxes, and welcoming friendship with new financial landowners (2024 132). It is notable that Cahill and Shrubsole emphasise the importance of the aristocracy in specifying Britain’s political economy. While Christophers speaks to this in his brief history of landownership in The New Enclosure, the book’s emphasis on the privatisation of public land precludes him from the systematic and contemporary analysis that this landowning group deserves. Indeed, Shrubsole’s book and blog point to their role in Britain’s cultural political economy. The aristocracy and Crown Estate alike have transformed into corporate agents pursuing for-profit rationales — and serves to justify his broader political project — increasing accountability for large individual landowners, whom he believes have outsized social responsibilities (2024 62; 270). This approach is clearly indebted to Massey and Catalano’s typology. The proliferate use of offshore tax havens are a “lifeline to the ailing aristocracy”, as is the uneven distribution of agricultural subsidies, before and after Brexit (2024 100).19 While his research is fruitfully cited, I argue his work deserves further attention, as a project for accountability of landowners despite the constraints of land registration infrastructure. This is particularly vital as research into the aristocracy is lacking not only in economic geography, but even in subfields such as the sociology of elites, which primarily focus on financiers and the monarchy.20 Further, Shrubsole’s background in campaign work is important in understanding his 19 After campaign work conducted by FarmSubsidy, the European Union ruled that farm payments data from the EU Common Agricultural Policy had to be transparent. However, maps are not included in data published on overall farm subsidies, making it difficult to map land ownership. (Shrubsole 2019 39-40) After Brexit, the Government is replacing CAP payments under a seven year Agricultural Transition period from 2021-2028, with the last payments under CAP being made in 2023 (Coe and Uberoi 2023). 20 Monteath’s work is an exception, as well as Stewart et al. (2001) and Friedman and Reeves (2020). 41 contributions to the political economy of land. His work in 2010-11 against the privatisation of national forests is even acknowledged in the conclusion of The New Enclosure as a rare example of contesting enclosure. From Who Owns England it is possible to infer his formulation of the Right to Roam campaign, launched in 2020. The “concentration of ownership is visible in the landscape itself”, he argues, and yet “if you can't see it, you're less likely to ask questions about who owns it." (2019 21; 24) For him, the act of trespass is an act of research into land ownership, and by this time he is already beginning to coordinate small trespasses on aristocratic estates — the primary form of direct action that would come to define the Right to Roam campaign. For Shrubsole, campaigning is an extension of his investigative research: a mechanism to engage broader publics in the land question and publicise his findings. I discuss Right to Roam’s contributions to the land question in the next chapter. Beyond Christophers’ justified focus on the privatisation of public land, Cahill and Shrubsole explicitly aims to draw attention to the land question more broadly, unsettling and thus specifying Britain’s political economy with their focus on the continuing dominance of aristocratic ownership and the steady formalisation of property in land registration systems — both of which serve to obfuscate public discourse and research. It is through looking back that they give a necessarily historicised account of land registration infrastructure, which in turn demonstrates the decline in the land question. 2.3.2. How is land registration infrastructure produced? The process of registering land enables its production into a commodity for circulation in land and property markets. In England and Wales, research into the land question is constrained not only by this process of commodification, which treats land data itself as a commodity, but because it is also constrained: the custom of primogeniture prevents the Land Registry from 42 comprehensive registration. So far, I have discussed how Cahill and Shrubsole have produced land ownership data in spite of these constraints, and in doing so, reveal them to a broader audience. Their public scholarship proves vital to interventions in the English land question. To further characterise England’s political economy of land, we must critically examine how land registration infrastructure has been produced over time and space. In this section, I examine how land registration has developed in England and through its colonial entanglements into the system of title by registration still used today. This enables us to specify England’s political economy of land, defining the contemporary English land question in relation to its development and to other land questions. By articulating land registration systems as infrastructure, we can understand it as a tool for the appropriation of land and knowledge, with implications for the broader political economy of knowledge production. To specify the English land question, we have to look back and elsewhere. 2.3.2.1. Looking back The Land Registry of England and Wales operates under the system of title by registration. Under this system, one’s ‘ownership’ of land is signified by a land title, represented on a paper or digital document, and kept within a centralised registry usually run by the state. This system is relatively new in the history of English land registration, having been fully introduced almost 100 years ago with the Land Registration and Law of Property Acts of 1925, in part a result of the land question debates that peaked in the 1840s and 1870s. These Acts, and indeed the development of land registration leading up to and afterward, remain critical to understanding land relations in England today. Understanding land registration as an infrastructure, Timothy Monteath argues missing data — specifically domestic properties owned by overseas shell companies — is not a 43 ‘bug’ “but a ‘feature that stems from the long-arch historical development of the system of land ownership and registration”, exploring its entanglement between elite formation (2021 259-260). In essence, financiers operating offshore and investing in UK property owe a lot to aristocrats and their responses to land reformers during the peak of the English land question in the 19th century. To understand this, and thus the specificity of the English political economy of land, we have to look further back to the early development of land registration infrastructure, which, for Monteath, began with the English Land Tax after the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688-89. Levied from 1692 to its removal in the Finance Act of 1963, the tax was not implemented under a centralised state, did not deploy mapping of property boundaries, nor did it register land transactions. But what it demonstrates is the persistent tendency within England towards concentration of land ownership by aristocrats. Eschewing the organisational power of the state, this tax was “levied on the landed gentry by the landed gentry” (Kain and Baigent 1992). In contrast to land registration and taxation infrastructure in other European countries, this system preserved rather than disbanded the alignment between the aristocracy and the state and monarchy, specifying England’s political economy as a “joint interest” model, as Cahill has described (Monteath 2021; Cahill 2001). Monteath argues the typical characterisation of the English enclosure movement by economic historians — accurately, as precipitating mass population transfer, urbanisation and industrialisation — “disguises the continuity for those at the top” as land ownership remained highly concentrated in rural areas (Monteath 2021 146). With the land question debates, land law reformers such as the Cobden School from Manchester attempted to constrain aristocratic power in pursuit of greater ‘free trade in land’. While their proposals were repeatedly voted down by predominantly landowning parliamentarians, the land question debates successfully formulated the Land Registry Act of 1862. However, this perceived win — and its ambition of total 44 registration — failed to implement the breadth of previous recommendations under the land question, and did not result in compulsory registration across the country. Barring a temporary exemption for the City of London, the Land Transfer Bill 1887 did. Yet despite its name it only applied to land transactions, not deeds of gift or transfer by primogeniture, the latter of which is still not subject to registration today. Monteath shows how this secrecy persists within land registration infrastructure, affecting contemporary statistics for the land and property market. With focus diverted from aristocratic ownership to mass owner-occupation homeownership in the 20th century, the first figures quantifying the property market were produced privately. While the creation of the Land Registry with the Land Registration Act 1925 eased the secrecy of the 1862 Act, it also created a complex nine-layer hierarchy defining access to data, and thus did not contribute to this production of data. “Only those involved in a property transaction were able to access the information contained within for the purposes of conveyancing.” (Monteath 2021 169) Only with the Land Registration Act of 1988 could it be said the infrastructure had moved from “no access, unless”, to “access, unless”, and this was followed by consecutive decades of legislation expanding the scope of triggers for compulsory registration (Berlee 2018 263). As Cooke argues, “nearly, but not quite, everything one does with a legal estate in land triggers registration” (Cooke 2003 in Monteath 2021 198). Transfer via primogeniture remains off limits. This persistent ‘joint interest’ within the infrastructure has left loopholes for financial landowners to exploit and avoid transparency and accountability mechanisms to be exercised by public institutions. Yet this is not the only consequence of this continuity. While he is unable to explore it further, Monteath points to the work of critical theorist and legal scholar Brenna Bhandar, who shows how colonial-capital accumulation is rooted in the implementation of title by registration in settler colonial expansion (Bhandar 2018). 45 2.3.2.2. And looking elsewhere Bhandar’s work is both historical and transcolonial, tracing the development of settler colonial legal frameworks across Britain, British Columbia, South Australia, South Africa and Israel-Palestine. Through title by registration, colonial property relations were formalised across these contexts, beginning in South Australia with British colonial officer Richard Torrens, who gave his name to the system through the Real Property Act (Australia) 1858. Two years later, this was attempted in England with the Land Registry Act of 1862. However, this was a failed attempt to introduce state-backed national infrastructure, registering just 2,000 properties (HM Land Registry 2014). Due to difficulties mapping and surveying property, further attempts in 1875 and 1897 failed. Thus title by registration was only nationally implemented across England and Wales several decades later, with the Land Registration Act of 1925. For Bhandar, title by registration is one example of how “modern laws of private property are cast in developmental terms, shifting from early modern justifications for ownership based in possession and use to more abstract forms of ownership” (2018 23). But as her historical work shows, this widespread narrative of unilinear progress does not play out in practice. Rather than a unidirectional export of infrastructure emerging from a unified English state, Bhandar shows how title by registration was developed between contexts, informed by the specificity of land relations in England and colonial perceptions of South Australia. Specifically, resistance to title by registration by the English aristocracy precipitated the development of the Torrens system in South Australia, which was understood as an ‘empty space’, with Aboriginal peoples deemed unable to exercise legitimate land relations. For Torrens, the colony of Australia was a space unencumbered by the social relations of aristocracy, by history, by a past. The colony of Australia as a terra nullius provides a space for a radical break with the political and legal inheritance of England. (Bhandar 2018 95) 46 “Here,” wrote Torrens, in Australia, “feudal tenures — the source of all the complication — never had existence.” (Bhandar 2018 95) According to him, neither did Indigenous relations to land, either undermined entirely or understood as incompatible with possessive logics of ownership. On one hand, the doctrine of terra nullius violently erased Indigenous land relations through abstract racial categorisations and discourses of savagery, which made both Aboriginal land rights “a non question” in conjunction with a view of land as free, fungible, and commodifiable.21 On the other hand, the attachment of aristocrats and lawyers to traditional processes of primogeniture, entail and conveyancing, which kept land transfer under their control, resisted title by registration and the Cobden reformers’ attempt to create a ‘free market in land’. While the 1925 Act did replace conveyancing, the informal practice of primogeniture remained intact, with rippling effects on the concentration of land ownership in Britain today. As Torrens wrote, “the genius of conservatism is opposed to any such radical reform as would lead to diminish obstructions which tend to preserve the hereditary acres in the old lines of descent.” (in Bhandar 85 f28). While she does not explore the continuity of aristocratic land relations and memory beyond this example, Bhandar does indicate their ability to avoid being subject to title by registration in this regard. Drawing on Alain Pottage, who understands title by registration as a centralised “administrative archive” of land relations, she describes how it renders prior ownership interests irrelevant; that which is recorded on the document archived in the state registry becomes the proof of ownership, not the historical memory, social use, kinship ties, or other relations that were bound up with land use and ownership for centuries prior to becoming more fully commodified. (Pottage 1994; Bhandar 2018 85) 21 Historian Carl Griffin has recently argued ‘wastes’ in England were also understood as terra nullius, with contemporary thinkers and architects of enclosure applying discourses of improvement to both lands and their people in both in both the colonies and England, albeit unevenly. As he writes, “debates about the nature of enclosure and improvement were quick to draw upon the colonial experience overseas, both in terms of the languages used but also in term of direct comparisons.” (Griffin 2023 119) Discourses of idleness and savagery travelled, in some cases with direct comparison; in others, more distance between England and elsewhere was created. However, Griffin utimately finds that ‘internal colonial thought’ shaped, and was shaped by, colonial policies abroad, and contributed to the making of the ‘rural poor’ in England (Griffin 2023). Such findings invite research into comparative memory culture. 47 The question is: Whose memory matters? Whose social use and kinship ties continue to be exercised, and by virtue of the enclosure of common rights, whose have been systematically extinguished? In England, aristocrats are still able to partially evade the commodification and measurement of land by registration, and yet, as I show in the next section, they benefited from another kind of commodification of land and knowledge during the English enclosure movement — even as much aristocratic land remains unregistered. 2.3.2.3. Mapping memory The commodification of land is possible through its registration, which as Bhandar says, requires proof of ownership. When you pay the £7 fee to access any given title from the Land Registry, you receive a corollary map, delineating the boundaries of the property and any further interests. It is in part through such maps that land is traded as a commodity. This has not always been the case. Indeed, a significant moment in the development of land registration infrastructure was the shift in how conveyancers proved land title through surveying practices. From the 16th century to the 19th century, land transfer law was highly implicated by the shift from what is called the ‘court of survey’ to the ‘cadastral map’. The General Enclosure Act of 1801 required cadastral maps to be attached to individual enclosure acts. Land transfer law was also implicated by the shift to title by registration in the early 20th century, which as we can see today, institutionalised the property boundary as evidence of title. These processes have each had a substantial and definitive effect on the value of local memory in land transfers. I begin with the court of survey, which for centuries was the dominant mode of proving land title, and was constructed “with the help of those tenants whose memories went back the furthest” (Blomley 2019 239, citing Taylor 1947). While courts of survey listed the features and assets within the estate, including the extent of highly 48 localised common rights, the later cadastral surveys focused on identifying property owners in relation to the area of land said to be under ownership (Kain and Baigent 1992). “If the traditional surveyor relied on oral memory, the modern surveyor traded in visuality” (Blomley 2019 239-240) The transition from the court of survey to cadastral map therefore spatialised the survey, a shift that for practicing surveyors required performing property differently, heavy citational labour that “entailed a remarkable cognitive shift” (Blomley 2019 239-240). One surveyor was advised to first imagine the manor as an abstract space, walking or riding around the manor once or twice so ‘that you may have as it were a Map of it in your head’ (Blomley 2019; Love 1623/1687 142). Through this shift, the cadastral “survey was no longer a description of the use-rights that inhered in a particular site, but a rendering of land as a bounded parcel of space.” (Blomley 2019 239) In abstracting customary rights and other landscape features from their cognitive map of the landscape, it was easier to focus on the features that made land ‘valuable’ as a commodity, including the boundaries of the property. This had an effect on both local memory and institutional memory, at this time simply the foundations for title by registration as an “administrative archive” (Pottage 1994 361). Taking on the status of truth, the cadastral map not only performed the property without customary rights, but with the effect of doing so indefinitely. Even in the case that one feature like a river was diverted, the overall character of the property could ultimately be retained as “continuall evidence” in conveyancing, as professional surveyor Randulph Agas wrote in 1596 (Kain and Baigent 1992 4). In contrast to the former written survey, Agas argued the cadastral map offered precise location, efficiency of land management and permanence of record. By the 18th and 19th century, cadastral maps took on the symbolic value of the property itself. They were often proudly presented and adorned with the family coat of arms, signifying the extent of area owned in relation to “an individual’s right, rooted in the past, to the possession of land.” 49 (Kain and Baigent 1992 8) Today, many will be kept — alongside other historical records — within the bounds of the estate, including in private archives. Therefore, the cadastral map was enrolled in the elite redefinition of land relations in England, securing both current, past and future land ownership as common right was being extinguished. Surveyors were enrolled in a broader project of denigrating commoners. In The Surveyor’s Dialogue, cartographer John Norden wrote that commoners were “as ignorant of God […] as the very savages amongst the infidels” (in Griffin 2023 105). Likewise, in colonial contexts, as Bhandar states, cadastral mapping emerged both “as a technique of appropriation and a mode of knowledge production” (2018 92), enclosing other land and property relations. As Blomley writes of the use of maps in colonial settlement: If colonial possession was dependent upon dispossession, the survey serves as a form of organized forgetting. Johnson reads colonial cartography, in part, as an instrument through which a space of imagined emptiness is sequentially filled with European entitlements. Absent from these maps, of course, are prior entitlements, as well as the “ongoing processes of regulation, dispossession, containment, and resistance.” (Blomley 2003 128, my emphasis) But as Blomley’s work also shows, the abstraction and erasure of customary relations also occurred in England, just at a more gradual pace over time, and indeed drawing from practices developed in British colonial settlement elsewhere, with the most significant developments occurring in Ireland during the 17th century (Blomley 2003b). The relationship between cadastral mapping and land registration practices is a clear example of how performances of property enrol each other. Both enable the commodification of land, valuing land through its constitutive elements. Indeed, critical cartographers understand mapping to be performative: not inert objects but practiced events that perform the worlds they claim to describe (Pickles 2004; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Crampton 2009). The proliferation of cadastral maps performed a place as private property, just as written surveys did, but more significantly they did so without also performing customary rights and other features of the land 50 that inhered in local memory. As a result, private property appeared as settled and uncontested, obfuscating the heterogeneity of property relations enacted on the land through customary practice. As Blomley describes, “one of the crucial performative effects of property is to produce the appearance of resolution, simplicity, order, certainty and security. This should not be overlooked: despite its manifest exclusions, expulsions, and violence, it appears equitable and benign.” (Blomley 2013 38) In employing the cadastral survey, landowners embarked on a substantial project of elite redefinition of what land meant, in effect extinguishing customary use and memory from the practice of conveyancing thereafter — and later, of course, the system of title by registration that persists. 2.4. Defining customary practice While the landed aristocracy continue to maintain continuous memory through patrilineal lines, settlement, and estate archives, commoners were stripped of their continuity in place because of enclosure. While we have so far understood that the English land question has declined and narrowed in political discourse since the 20th century, this research aims to show that English land relations have been constrained for far longer, with the enclosure, appropriation, and commodification of land and knowledge accumulating over time at the expense of collective memory. As the land question is concerned with not just ownership of land, but use and access, it must also be concerned with the role of status in the broader political economy of knowledge production. In other words, those who are able to access and use land are able to define the scope of the land question. We must delineate aristocratic and capitalistic land relations from those exercised through customary practice under common right. In this section, I explore how the enclosure of land implicated the practice of customary land relations, a form of place-based, embodied knowledge. The knowledge of commoners was systematically denigrated during the 51 agricultural revolution and ‘Enlightenment’, reconfiguring expertise over land management. So far, I have explored how cadastral mapping and land registration infrastructure have undermined the practice of customary knowledge. In this section, I expand on this, exploring laws of trespass and the production of agricultural manuals and pamphlets; concluding that commodification of land should be understood as co-constitutive with the commodification of knowledge. Introducing the concept of epistemic enclosure, which makes this relationship explicit, I want to show the potential of the land question to be broader than even its peak in the 1840s and 1870s, and to pose a greater challenge to capitalist property relations than the Cobden School’s demand for a free market in land. Whose use of land and whose memories matter? This question remains pertinent in any attempt to redefine the English land question today. 2.3.1. What is custom? Prior to enclosure, commoners drew upon common rights to land through their exercise of customary practice. Held in their memory, custom was authoritative as a “rigorous, detailed, and precise corpus of local law” (Thompson 1991), although it was informal, tacit, unwritten. Therefore, underpinning common rights were a heterogeneity of relations to land and knowledge systems cultivated within the commons (Neeson 1993). Once common rights were extinguished by enclosure, and access to land was denied, related customs were no longer practiced. This heterogeneity of knowledge was obfuscated by formal title and record: elites redefining land relations. In Commoners, historian Neeson excavates their existence through her reading of Land Tax returns, as well as customary field orders, inventories, and pamphlets. As use rights were held in common, and applied to the open fields system, commons were sites of constant — although not inherently cooperative — forms of negotiation. They were sites of local and seasonal 52 knowledge production and relation, requiring a variety of skills, and from which emerged a frugal, reciprocal economy based on relations of obligation and responsibility (Neeson 1993). Critically, commoners’ production of knowledge was not dependent on their ownership of land, but on their exercise of common right through customary practice. It was independent of land title and broader institutional records. In the face of enclosure, custom was deployed as evidence of continual use, and even field margins remained sites of commoning: “Enclosures may have left the reclamation of waste land wait several years during which former commoners may have continued to take what they wanted. Or memories might last much longer.” (Neeson 1993 183) The exercise of customary practices persisted after extinguishment of common right, and in this transition there remained relatively widespread social acceptance for these practices (Neeson 1993). This is clearly seen in the figure of the ‘moucher’ and practices of village women. The moucher was an accepted trespasser, necessarily committing acts of trespass to forage, wood and fowl. As late as the 1870s, village women were dedicated gatherers. And yet, despite their existence, no “matter how much they believed they owned the right, the fact was at law they did not.” (Neeson 1993 184) What was therefore lost through enclosure was not individuals practicing custom, but a much broader social system and set of epistemologies to legitimise their uses of land in resistance to the law. While memories of common right persisted for a time, it was the surrounding infrastructure and production of institutional memory that led to their loss. Once again, this shift can be read into the written record: “By the end of the nineteenth century even the word gleaning [formerly a customary right] had taken on the sense of theft.” (Neeson 1993 184) It was not only hedges, fences and the law that facilitated enclosure, but broader processes of elite redefinition and the persistent denigration of commoners’ knowledge. As I will explore, in the early modern era, the Board of Agriculture financed and legitimised the production of pamphlets by pro-enclosure propagandists 53 which attempted to shape public opinion and normalise the enclosure of land. These writers systematically excluded the perspective of commoners, even in ignorance serving to reinforce biases against customary knowledge and ways of life; folkways. One of Neeson’s major findings is that commoners were well dispersed across the country, with common right giving them independence and income, while the extinguishment of common right led to the decline of small farms and increased dependence on waged labour. This is now generally accepted amongst heterodox historians of enclosure. However, using Land Tax records, and explicitly addressing the constraints of a written record shaped by processes of enclosure, she also diverges from influential social historians to show how a substantial peasant population persisted into the 18th century. Following the work of Chambers and Mingay, economic historians such as Neil Brenner have largely accepted the orthodox conclusion that because parliamentary enclosure reached a peak in 1750-1820, with 20.9% of England’s land area (30% of its total agricultural land) enclosed by Acts of Parliament, commoners had effectively died out (Chambers and Mingay 1966; Brenner 1976). Likewise, in the influential social history Captain Swing, Hobswawm and Rudé proclaim that after 1750, peasants were only “unimportant minorities” (1969 21). These conclusions are flawed, Neeson argues, because Mingay’s original account shows different parishes had different tax rates, affecting the accuracy of generalised claims that evidence the Land Tax record. Thus the very infrastructure of enclosure continued to constrain knowledge production. In his groundbreaking book The Invention of Capitalism, Michael Perelman shows how the orthodox accounts of this period built cumulative force to shape classical political economic perspectives of the enclosure period (Perelman 2000). But what Neeson’s work indicates is the real possibility for this same patterning within heterodox treatments too, therefore urging scholars to traverse historical and contemporary accounts of land relations, and produce recursive 54 and reflexive analyses of changing social relations to land. Ideally, a comprehensive analysis of the tax rates Neeson describes could be conducted as part of further research, but for now we have her account to explain why the orthodox record must be routinely challenged within historiography and, in tandem, collective memory as reified in public discourse. By focusing on Northamptonshire, Neeson strengthens her argument that common right persisted for longer than historical consensus permits, and in conjunction, that in authoring much of our written sources, “the enclosers’ view shaped the official record long after the enclosure period itself.” (Neeson 1993 7) From 1730, Northamptonshire was subject to some of the highest rates of enclosure in the country — 50-60% of its land was enclosed through Acts of Parliament — indeed, resulting in significant landscape change “which in many parts of the Midlands is still visible 200 years later.” (McDonagh and Daniels 2012 109) Historical sources, drawn primarily from Land Tax records, indicate that anywhere between 16% to 68% of occupants in 18th century Northamptonshire were commoners, a mean of 37%. Given the severity of enclosures in the county, even these figures question the extent to which commoners can be considered “unimportant minorities”. Even so, Neeson’s critical and reflexive engagement of historical sources — written by enclosers — suggests the real figure would be higher. Land Tax records are unlikely to include small landholders worth less than 20s per year, who were therefore exempt from the land tax, and certainly do not include those who occupied subleased land who also held common right. Further, “enclosure commissioners did not recognise claims based on residence”, and enclosure awards reflected only currently stocking levels not recent or future levels, so “enclosure commissioners relied on proof of present use.” (Neeson 1993 77) The extinguishment of common right was also the extinguishment of its record, and the extinguishment of record has led to the loss of memory of common right up to the present day. In attaching rights to private 55 property rather than collective use rights, enclosure commissioners were deliberately misrepresenting the nature of common right “in order to conform to enclosers’ law not custom.” (Neeson 1993 78) These authorial decisions have been performative, with cascading effects on the historical record that Neeson is has attempted to partially undo. Notably, she also finds the “rights of the landless are better documented where they resisted the loss of commons at enclosure.” (Neeson 1993 65) For this reason, accounts of resistance, including the documentation of ‘trespass’ under criminal law, become critical indicators of the presence of common right. Still, deploying her sharp recursive critique of the historical record, Neeson clarifies that prosecutions under trespass may only have been recorded if they resulted in significant and long-term consequences, while more routine acts of resistance and trespass were managed without codification (1993 148), indicating that customary practice is not represented in the administrative archive. As I show, this recursive approach is necessary when excavating actually-existing land relations, obfuscated by the commodification of land and knowledge, whether it be land registration infrastructure or laws of trespass. In the next section, I investigate these shifts, highlight how landowners perform private property through the exclusion and disciplining of ‘trespassers’ on the basis of their knowledge. 2.3.2. Who holds customary knowledge? So far, I have examined how the obfuscation of customary practice, including the spatialisation of surveying practices, has facilitated the commodification and registration of land. The development of private property relations over time and space has obfuscated and undermined a heterogeneity of property relations. In this section, I will explore how laws of trespass have been produced, commodifying land while denigrating customary knowledge. The so-called ‘spatialisation of trespass’, which I focus on, provides a window into the production of private property relations. 56 The word ‘trespass’ did not always mean to cross the boundary of private property. Prior to enclosure, it signified a generalised harm, “used in the mid thirteenth century to refer to a violation of the law not amounting to a felony, a category of crime which included theft, assault and even rape.” (McDonagh and Griffin 2016 3; Schofield 2010). Today, perhaps barring the Lord’s Prayer, trespass is synonymous with the boundaries of private property, detached from harms to the body or forms of theft. This semantic shift reveals the transformation in land relations in Britain over time. From the 13th to the 15th century, trespass was progressively spatialised or “hardened”, as “the notion of trespass against property as a civil offence was beginning to emerge” (McDonagh and Griffin 2016 3). By the 1650s, it was more widely used to refer to an illegal entry into property: a way of articulating and disciplining newly enclosed lands where customary rights had been extinguished by piecemeal enclosures. In 1765, in Commentaries on the Laws of England which attempted to unify the basis of English common law at the time, William Blackstone defined trespass as “an entry on another man's ground without legal authority, and doing some damage, however inconsiderable, to his real property” (1765, Book 3 Ch 12). This basic definition has remained consistent in English common law ever since. Historians Briony McDonagh and Carl Griffin posit the “progressive spatialisation of trespass” over this changing period: trespass is still a harm, but a harm to the landowner and by extension their property, defined through their authority and enrolling in the authority of the law (McDonagh and Griffin 2016 3). As customary rights begin to be systematically extinguished in the early stages of enclosure, we see the spatialisation of property rights into property boundaries. This has affected how property relations are understood today. Indeed, Blomley highlights that we have an odd tendency to speak of property spatially rather than as a bundle of rights: i.e. ‘this is my land’, rather than ‘this is the land over which I have a right to exclude you from’. However, he argues, 57 we need to recognize the significance of such a spatialization. Treating property as a spatialized thing, rather than a bundle of relationships, locates its central relationship as that between the owner and the thing owned. The effect is to suppress our understanding of the undeniable and often differential relations between the owner and other people (Blomley 2003 6). In taking on the logic of property as spatialised, we understand that the landowner has the ultimate authority to determine who has permission to use their land, as well as the boundaries of their property. The invocation of trespass therefore disciplines use of land, formalises property boundaries in space, and asserts landowner expertise over property, centralising their relation to land over others. Therefore, when we come to examine the actually-existing relations between people and objects in space, we can see how, given the landowners’ significant powers of discretion, the enforcement of trespass practiced against the body of the trespasser and is highly uneven. The enforcement of trespass is as much a performance as any act of trespass, because it is also contingent on changing relations. Critically, it is notoriously difficult to define trespass from a position of defense. After all, what constitutes harm or damage, when in the moment of enforcement, these are defined by the landowner? Laws of trespass remain the backbone of policing land use today. However, they therefore also offer a window into property relations, enabling us to interrogate them. Through spatialization, property becomes self-evident and impersonal. ... if we recognize that space is socially produced, and socially productive, we need also to recognize that it can be remade for different social ends. The spaces of property in that sense can be powerfully disciplinary but also transgressive. (Blomley 2003 7) Trespass is not just to cross one boundary of private property, then. To cross a fence, for example, is also to call into question trespass signs, the assumed authority of a landowner, and perhaps even the assumption of private property as settled. Particularly felicitous acts of trespass may even invoke the English enclosure movement and the loss of customary practices, articulating that dominant meanings of the fence have been made over time. In unsettling one performance of 58 private property, the act of trespass destabilises its enrolments in other performances. In this ‘unsettling’ of property, it reveals the continuing presence of heterogeneous property relations, whether in early modern England, or today. Neeson recognises historic acts of resistance are indicators for the existence of common right. But it can also be used to understand the continuity of heterogeneous property relations into the contemporary moment. Through a recursive approach, it is critical to examine how trespass has been mobilised as a mode of enforcement and as a mode of resistance, and what this reveals about the relationship between the extinguishment of common right and the commodification of knowledge over time. The most memorialised act of trespass in British history is the Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932, which took place in the Peak District.22 The Kinder Scout mass trespass is often credited with the Access to Mountains Act 1939 that legislated against landowners who gave walkers (or ‘trespassers’) a notice to leave. However, to instate the Act required walkers to pay £10, and make an application to the Ministry of Agriculture. Far from enshrining a public right of access, then, it actually made trespass a criminal offence under certain conditions, including walking during a grouse shoot. It was repealed by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. While this Act also did not enshrine a right of access, or a right to roam, it did institute the Peak 22 The most memorialised figure of the Kinder Scout mass trespass was Benny Rothman, a labourer and organiser. Before he began organising rambles and camps as part of the British Workers’ Sports Federation, his entry point into the land question began at night school with the YMCA, where he took courses in “advertising and salesmanship” and “economic geography”, which led to his joining of the Youth Communist League. “I just drifted into becoming a member,” he said. “They were talking my language.” (I found this detail in a transcript of an interview conducted with Benny Rothman kept at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, Manchester.) In his book, Rothman recounts his speech to thousands of attendees at Kinder Scout, where he “very briefly outlined the history of the injustice of enclosures, which had stolen Common Land from the people in a fraudulent series of so-called Enclosure Acts." (Rothman 1982 28) Yet the close association between mass trespass and Kinder Scout indicates that, generally speaking, the act of intentional trespass is remembered more for its effects on the improvement of recreational access rights than for the capacity of trespass to recall customary practice under common right. 59 District as a National Park — one of nine privately owned areas of upland in England and Wales with appointed National Park Authorities who would manage access rights with landowners. In part due to the memorialisation of Kinder Scout, it is lesser known that trespass had been mobilised to assert customary rights of way for centuries prior. A notable example is the Winter Hill mass trespass. On the 6th of September 1896, an estimated 10,000 people met in nearby Lancashire to contest the sudden closure of a moorland road by Colonel Richard Ainsworth, previously used as a right of way. Unlike Kinder Scout, which mobilised approximately 400 people, Winter Hill did not result in arrests. Indeed it was repeated a week later, to no further opposition from Ainsworth, who then effectively permitted their use. As Neeson argues, criminalised acts of trespass appear to receive more attention than assertions of customary rights because they are more likely to be written down, including in court records. Even earlier than Winter Hill, acts of intentional ‘trespass’ documented in manorial court records throughout the 17th and 18th century indicate they were even broader in focus than challenging the extinguishment of rights of way, or the assertion of recreational access by urban workers. These trespasses were assertions and reclamations of common right through the occupation of land formerly held in common; expressions of customary culture and commoning economy. ‘Trespassers’ not only played across the new borders of newly enclosed areas, beginning to be understood as private property for exclusive use and disciplined as such, but contested the changing meaning of trespass itself. Historian Leonard Baker has recently examined manorial records in Somerset and Dorset, noting that acts of trespass were likely far more widespread and variegated in nature than what has been written, and importantly, that acts of trespass have always been subject to uneven criminalisation. Under the Malicious Trespass Act 1820 (revised in 1827) laws of trespass were widely deployed, with 16% of all summary imprisonments in 1853 being 60 made under trespass (Baker 2019). The act enabled the conviction of anyone caught maliciously injuring a building, hedge, fence, tree or wood on privately owned land. Not all trespass would necessarily be read as an act of protest today: sometimes communities “simply ignored the boundaries of private property” in favour of exercising longstanding customary rights (Baker 2019 76). A recursive approach is vital: recall how gleaning, once a right, took on the meaning of theft. As assertions of common rights were understood as harms to private property, laws of trespass aligned apparent harms committed to moveable property to apparently immoveable boundaries of private property: Simply proving the presence of someone in a field or woodland was a great deal easier than proving a theft, especially because crop theft required proof that not only did the accused have the items but also that they were taken from the woods or field in question. (Baker 2019 77) Therefore, laws of trespass spatialised the property relation and were unevenly enforced. This is particularly critical in this study. The criminalisation of so-called trespass reflected who landowners understood to be legitimate holders of customary knowledge. Trespass is a window unto property relations, a basis of which is what knowledge is produced in relation to land. Here we return to the body. While able-bodied male trespassers and livestock were considered to be legitimate trespassers, acting in defence and continuation of dwindling customary rights, women and disabled people were understood as disorderly and riotous and therefore more harshly disciplined. Baker offers an example of a sheep accused of trespass, whose “‘roaming’ and ‘foraging’ tapped into a communal memory of a ‘taken-for-granted’ practiced and thus mobilized and legitimized” protest (Baker 2019 83). On the other hand, while women and disabled people were active in trespass, when brought to court were “often seen as having made a mistake rather than striking maliciously at farmers and landowners.” (Baker 2019 86) Their acts of resistance are also less visible in the historical record, being understood more simply as harms to private property 61 rather than assertions of custom. They were also more brutally punished within the social context. There are examples of women caught trespassing who were subject to mauling by dogs and acts of sexual abuse, and of disabled people who were mocked and delegitimised, with one described as a ‘half-idiot’ (Baker 2019 88). Ultimately, it was elite redefinition of land relations that politicised and criminalised previously everyday acts into acts of trespass, and with great variation based on a conflation between the body, intellect, and capacity to exercise customary memory (Jacoby 2001; Baker 2019). Commissioners and landowners redefined “walking as ‘wilful trespass’ [transforming] an everyday practice into a criminal act”, in part by stopping-up roads and publicly announcing the extinguishment of common rights (Baker 2019 76). By the early 20th century, land registration infrastructure had centralised proof of title into an administrative archive, enabling the commodification of land; to prove title, cadastral maps had replaced reference to place through embodied experience as apparently continual evidence of ownership; and the progressive spatialisation of trespass made disciplining use rights by the owner more efficient, discrediting the legitimacy of customary right in uneven ways. In demonstrating the continuity, frequency and origins of trespass, a mechanism for making visible the heterogeneity of land uses, the subject of collective memory is not relegated to discrete, unique moments in British political history, but an expression of the continuous extinguishment of common right enacted through repeated performances of private property. Into the 20th and 21st century, it is clear trespass continues to act as a way of negotiating, contesting and enforcing land use across groups. Understanding trespass as “one of the few effective ‘weapons of the weak’”, borrowing from James Scott, geographer Tim Cresswell describes how members of the public trespassed into Stonehenge following a High Court injunction prohibiting free festivals in 1985 (Cresswell 1992 89). For this group, continual use of 62 Stonehenge is a form of memory, enacting how it has been used for generations prior. After violating the injunction, these ‘trespassers’, including pregnant women, were violently beaten, with 537 arrested in one of the largest mass arrests in English legal history. Known as the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’, this event parallels older acts of intentional trespass. However, the public’s assertions of customary use were not as taken seriously as men and sheep trespassing in the 17th and 18th century, with debates around legitimate use quashed at the national scale. The event was invoked by the National Farmers’ Union and government ministers in proposals for the Public Order Act 1986, and later the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, both of which further criminalised trespass under certain conditions. In the development of the 1986 Act, parliamentary debates discussed how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate trespass in modes of criminalisation. These reproduced longstanding distinctions, dating back to the 18th and 19th century: It would be a poor day if Home Office Ministers did not meet the National Farmers Union or the Country Landowners Association. As the hon. Gentleman knows, our doors are also open to the Ramblers Association and others. [...] Although we have found some answers in the Public Order Bill, we must search for a way of distinguishing between what the hon. Gentleman is talking about and the undoubted mischiefs (Douglas Hurd MP, HC Deb June 3 1986) This distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of land, namely the ‘innocent’ act of rambling versus ‘mischievous’ cultural practice, persisted in wide-ranging debates surrounding the Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (hereafter “Police Act 2022”), which further criminalised trespass under certain conditions. Initially, the Conservative government sought to make all “intentional trespass” a criminal offence, including recreational trespass, however the underlying intention of the Bill was to further criminalise the nomadic ways of life practiced by English Gypsies and Irish Travellers (Burgum Jones and Powell 2022 220). The final version of the Police Act passed in 2022 reproduced delineations in the 1980s, and denigration of customary 63 practice over time.23 While recreational forms of intentional trespass are largely unaffected and remain civil, if vague and discretionary conditions of “damage, disruption or distress” are met, ‘recreational’ acts of trespass could be criminalised. It therefore continues to be the case that the extent of trespass is largely determined by the landowner, and indeed, what counts as legitimise use or harm. Indeed, the Act defines this through new forms of criminalisation, applying to any “wilful obstruction of the highway” under protest, and placing further stringent measures on English Gypsies and Travellers ability to establish “unauthorised encampments” as part of their nomadic practices. Following decades of targeted legislation towards the ethnic group, Burgum, Jones and Powell find the consultation for the Act “evidences the state’s continued lack of will to accommodate difference and acknowledge nomadic ways of inhabiting space”, constituting a civilising offensive that is “part of a wider longer-term trend to solidify Euro-Liberal, formalised and rationalised property regimes, foregrounding the relationship between property relations, race, and the continued stigmatisation of Gypsy-Travellers.” (2022 1231) Following Bhandar (2018), Blomley (2003) and Libby Porter (2010), they argue this follows other contexts of colonial dispossession “which had the effect of retroactively turning indigenous peoples into illegal trespassers on their own land [...] premised upon Lockean property theories that saw the appropriation of ‘un-used’ land as morally and economically justified” (2022 1222). Despite Scotland’s ‘comprehensive’ right to roam, the Trespass (Scotland) Act 1865, which remains “the most common charge brought against Scottish nomadic Gypsy-Travellers”, also criminalising trespass with intent to reside, and “was itself a direct response to the mass displacement of communities after the land enclosures of the Highland Clearances” (Burgum Jones Powell 2022 1222; Holligan 2014). Further demonstrating the co-constitutive nature of trespass law in England 23 Please refer to f4 on p10 and f21 on p48 for further evidence on the denigration of commoners in relation to those colonised by the British Empire. 64 across colonial borders, a 2019 memorandum published by the Home Office suggests the Police Act 2022 is explicitly rooted in the criminalisation of Travellers in Ireland. The memo, announcing the aforementioned consultation, states the Home Office were “learning lessons from other countries like the Republic of Ireland”, where racism towards travelling communities is rooted in British colonialism (Home Office 2019; Helleiner 2010). Thus trespass law continues to extinguish customary practices in favour of forcible settlement. 2.3.3. The ‘enclosure’ of knowledge I will close this section with a final example of how customary practice and knowledge has been subordinated to the logics of private property ownership and associated land management practices. In his recent book The Enclosure of Knowledge, historian James Fisher conducts a systematic analysis of agricultural pamphlets and husbandry manuals from the mid-17th century to 19th century, arguing that the origin story of capitalism is not only resides in the appropriation of land through enclosure, but the appropriation of customary agricultural knowledge in books. Fisher’s work is significant because, like Neeson, his work is recursive. In critique of the teleological ‘grand narrative’ of the agricultural revolution which constitutes the ‘Enlightenment model’, he explicitly challenges orthodox narratives of enclosure perpetuated by both orthodox and heterodox political economists and economic historians. By focusing on class divisions between agricultural labourers and writers, and the technical difficulties in translating practice to text and back again, he emphasises the elite redefinition of place-based knowledge through the production of agricultural knowledge in books. While agricultural knowledge was embodied, held in customary practice by commoners and tenant farmers, and passed down intergenerationally through apprenticeship and tutelage, the 65 proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. (Fisher 2022) Fisher’s main contribution is to show how this process of “enclosure” enabled learned men “to monopolise agricultural book knowledge [and] exert greater control over the labour process in managerial positions as landowners, stewards and large farmers.” (Fisher 2022 267) For instance, Duty of a Steward, written by land surveyor Edward Laurence, was the “first manual to argue that stewards should possess agricultural expertise”, and broadened Laurence’s field of interest from surveying and mapping estates to land valuation, the letting of estates, and the authorship of husbandry manuals (Fisher 2022 223). Perhaps all of these roles depended on his experience as a land surveyor, but what it does suggest is that the production of expertise and legitimisation of ownership required citational labour to divide mental and manual labour, as Fisher argues, and as I have already discussed regarding the cognitive maps of surveyors. In turn, the appropriation of customary knowledge into agricultural treatises and pamphlets was often met with resistance, with commoners believing agricultural writers as patronising and appropriative of their knowledge. In one anti-enclosure pamphlet written in 1785, an anonymous farmer wrote of his experience being interviewed by a writer: [I]t gives the clown pleasure to delude and mislead the gentleman in his notions of farming; and this disposition arises partly from a jealousy lest the gentleman should know as much as himself. (r168 Fisher 2022 119) Fisher gives many further accounts, such as this, of how practitioners of husbandry refused to share their knowledge, in itself expressing its value. Thus for Fisher, the “slow enclosure of customary knowledge” and the “social reorganisation of knowledge were necessary corollaries.” (Fisher 2022 6) Although he is arguing for the significance of books in the study of the development of agrarian capitalism, he ultimately distinguishes the enclosure of land from the ‘enclosure’ of knowledge, 66 which he uses in a metaphorical sense. Enclosure is understood as “a set of gradual processes through which the management of land was transformed and contested, and as a synecdoche for the structural shifts in landownership, which concentrated land in fewer hands”. (Fisher 2022 5) Similarly, the enclosure of customary knowledge in agricultural books gradually transformed the management of knowledge, and printed books were only the most conspicuous (and inherently best documented) of diverse trends that concentrated knowledge and expertise in fewer hands. (5) It is analogous to the enclosure of land because it had a similarly profound effect on how knowledge was accessed, how it was managed as a resource and who controlled it. (Fisher 2022 265) However, it is also clear from his research that knowledge is situated and embodied, even if agricultural writers refused to see commoners as legitimate holders of agricultural knowledge. Writing from his post in the Society of Arts in London, William Marshall proposed fellow authors should live in a certain locale for a year, to “minutely observe and register the living practice which surrounds him” for conversation with commoners would not be fruitful (Marshall 1787 xi-ix in Fisher 2022). According to Marshall, they could not probably communicate their knowledge, with any degree of precision: for their art being the result of habit, it is too familiar to be minutely described the art of agriculture must ever remain imperfect while it is suffered to languish in the memory, and die with the practitioner: record, only, can perpetuate the art’. (Marshall 1787 xi-ix in Fisher 2022) Fisher argues, the “need for learned society to appropriate the mystery of husbandry was driven partly by a fear that customary knowledge could be lost, and partly by a belief that it could not progress until it had been stored and systematised in texts.” (2022 112) But this fear was self-fulfilling, an example of elite redefinition, as the extinguishment of common rights was deliberate and intentional, not a natural process to be avoided. The situated and embodied nature of customary knowledge is understood as a barrier to its appropriation, requiring early forms of ethnography 67 that were, of course, understood by actual practitioners as appropriative. However, by delineating the enclosure of land and enclosure of knowledge from each other, Fisher forgoes the significance in recognising how commoners produced their knowledge through their being in relation to land. Agricultural writers may have been afraid of the loss of customary knowledge, but in undermining the capacities of commoners, were responsible for appropriating it and delegitimising their continued customary practice. In holding these positions, the following analysis is possible: Some agricultural writers understood that observation, a degree of situatedness, was necessary before codification of knowledge was possible. This too required access to land, even if only for a relatively short period of time. The memory of land was dependent on their use of it, for a time protected by common right. While commoners developed knowledge in relation to land, their relation to land was enclosed partially as a result of the appropriation of this knowledge. As we close this chapter, I further explore the utility of Fisher’s research in understanding this shift. In doing so, I ask the reader to consider the relationship between the continued extinguishment of use rights to land through enclosure, and the continued loss of knowledge facilitated by land registration infrastructure, surveying practices, and indeed, the denial of access to land maintained through laws of trespass. I argue we are in need of a robust conceptualisation that better facilitates broader recursive analysis of (epistemic) enclosure, and provides a theoretical framework from which to broaden the English land question in scholarship and political discourse. 2.3.4. Knowledge as a fictitious commodity Fisher’s account of the elite redefinition and appropriation of agricultural knowledge through agricultural manuals and treatises brings us even closer to understanding the 68 commodification of land and place-based knowledge as a unified process. Indeed, closing the book, Fisher argues his research implicates histories of knowledge under capitalism. To demonstrate this, he intervenes in Bob Jessop’s work articulating knowledge as a fictitious commodity in the proclaimed contemporary ‘knowledge economy’. While “economic theory treats [the commodification of knowledge] as a distinctly modern phenomenon”, Fisher writes, he argues his study makes evident this process begins as early as the mid-17th century (2022 274). Developing Karl Polanyi’s tripartite account of land, money and labour as fictitious commodities — that is, commodities not originally produced for sale — Jessop explores how knowledge can also be treated as a fourth ‘fictitious commodity’ through various mechanisms, including the “private expropriation of the collectively produced knowledge handed down from previous generations” (2007 126). While Jessop uses the English enclosure movement as an analogy for recent instances where Indigenous knowledge has been appropriated in direct acts of biocolonialism, Fisher argues this ‘enclosure of knowledge’ occurs in a similar process, more extenuated and uneven, [to] be seen in the historical transition to a capitalist society. In particular, a recognised feature of peasant knowledge is that due to being embedded within the cultural practices of a local community it can be difficult for outsiders to access. In such contexts, writing is a key tool to gain access to knowledge and render it amenable to commodification, which is impossible while it remains bound within labour, custom and memory. (2022 275) There is a broader argument to be made. While Fisher realises the capacity of printed books to access, codify and commodify customary knowledge, through the survey of this chapter I have also shown how cadastral surveying practices and laws of trespass also enabled elite redefinition of land relations and the denigration of customary knowledge, while simultaneously asserting the boundaries of private property, obfuscating and legally extinguishing customary practices, and enabling the commodification of land. Like Neeson, Fisher claims “customary knowledge could not be extinguished like common rights” (2022 265). However, it is important to stress the 69 intimate, interdependent, and often simultaneous relationship between them, as common right was exercised through customary practice. Specifically, the exercise of customary practice after the extinguishment of common right was reliant on intentional acts redefined as ‘trespass’, necessary in order to access land and exercise this place-based knowledge. These acts were therefore also acts of refusal, challenging and revealing performances of private property despite its obfuscation of customary practice. We must therefore see the enclosure of land and enclosure of knowledge as co-constitutive. To this end, I propose a conceptual tool that recognises, intervenes, or perhaps performs a recursive analysis of enclosure. 2.5. Epistemic enclosure In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene Nor fence of ownership crept in between To hide the prospect of the following eye … Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow Is both the shadow and the substance now — John Clare, ‘The Mores’ in Selected Poems “The tragedy of the commons, perhaps, is less its supposed internal failures as its external invisibility,” Blomley remarks (2003 8). In this chapter, I have traced treatments of the land 70 question, demonstrating how its decline should be understood in a historical process of enclosure and the political economy of knowledge production. Surveying the work of Neeson, Thompson, Blomley, Baker, McDonagh, Griffin, and Fisher, we can see how the extinguishment of common right and elite redefinition of customary land relations needs to be examined to understand its entanglement with the production of memory. Looking back and elsewhere, land registration infrastructure acts as a mode of appropriation and knowledge production, enabling elite redefinition of land relations to justify and consolidate land ownership. The processes by which land is commodified for sale have, in this case, led to the commodification of land data, but more broadly serve to obfuscate customary practice and knowledge production while also constraining research and political discourse. Fisher’s work demonstrates how elites commodified embodied knowledge to assert greater control over land, but elite redefinition also occurred through practices of surveying, the development of laws of trespass, and careful resistance to registration. By extinguishing common rights and disciplining customary practice, the broader political economy of knowledge production was implicated. As Fisher shows, the continuous performance of private property has a cumulative effect, gradually enclosing customary knowledge. Once a right is lost, it is at risk of being forgotten. To contextualise this shift over time, and work towards reigniting the land question, we have to excavate the breadth of land relations exercised through customary practice including under common rights. This requires conceptualising the enclosure of rights to land as epistemic: that is, affecting how knowledge about land is produced and collectively understood. As researchers are implicated in these processes, such work requires a recursive and reflexive approach, beginning with the performativity of property and our own relationships to land. The concept that use rights could be held exclusively by one individual has been performed so felicitously that it now takes us significant reflexivity to comprehend the scale of change made 71 possible by enclosure, which extinguishes specific customary rights held in common. In doing so, it restricts our collective ability to perform a heterogeneity of property relations, not only in fear of the disciplining inherent to the performance of private property relations, but due to the terra incognita — the 'parts unknown’ — that result from our exclusion from enclosed space. As aforementioned, Blomley understands land titling and mapping, for instance, as an “organised forgetting” while property “more generally is a site for storytelling that helps organize memory” (2003b; 2017 xv). If researchers are implicated in these broader political economy of land and knowledge production, how might we intervene? Despite the apparent amnesic force of enclosure, there remain visible traces of customary memory, not least in the poetry of John Clare, who witnessed enclosure in his home village of Helpston, in Northamptonshire. For Clare, this memory inheres in his relationship to land, both as a shadow of its former commons, and as substance, sustaining its commodification. His relationship to land persists through our act of reading and remembering. Perhaps that is enough. What memory of the commons provides us is not a past to which we return, but a narrative from which to make heterogeneous property relations visible as we enact them today. I argue that the work of remembering is also an act of performing property relations. In tracing enclosure, we also trace imaginaries and possible futures. Looking back, and moving forward, I posit the concept of epistemic enclosure. This enables us to unify the enclosure of land and the enclosure of knowledge production as co-constitutive processes, identifying instances of this entanglement as it is traced and remembered. In counter to the organised forgetting of enclosure, epistemic enclosure serves to organise our memories produced through recursive and reflexive analysis, identifying instances where the denial of access to land denies the production of customary knowledge in spaces of enclosure. Just as acts of ‘trespass’ recognise, critique and refuse performances of private property in spite of the semantic and 72 semiological construction of ‘trespass’, epistemic enclosure enables recursive analysis of how land relations are performed while being reflexive about how acts of enclosure discipline and exclude outside input. As I will show, embodied acts of trespass are interventions in epistemic enclosure. ‘Trespassers’ can refuse the ways performances of private property discipline and exclude, offering critical reflections on the use of language to the use of land, and question what is legitimate while remaining in dialogue with others and histories of enclosure. Through trespass, it is possible not only to access information about enclosed land and develop knowledge in relation to it, but recognise the performativity of property relations, enabling accountability of otherwise exclusive land use. In the next chapters, I show how Right to Roam, in organising acts of intentional trespass, intervene epistemic enclosure in pursuit of relational access to land. They understand trespass and land access reforms as a necessary step in cultivating greater belonging and knowledge of land across the English population. With a basis in research, including that by co-founder Guy Shrubsole, they demonstrate that land reform should have a basis in memory of enclosure. It traces an outline for a modern agenda for land reform on the national stage, as Shrubsole does in Who Owns England: Our starting point should be the historic injustice of the enclosures, and the memory of a time when 30 per cent of England was common land. (232) Most of all, the commons remind us of what has been lost. We need to remember the injustice of dispossession, the fact that huge swathes of land were stolen from the people by the elite, and that today most of us are landless. (Shrubsole 2019 217) As I have articulated with epistemic enclosure, the continual performance of private property depends on the extinguishment of customary knowledge and practice. In a performative analysis, the land relation itself is centred, and we can understand that common property relations are not forever extinguished. The memory of enclosure matters, therefore, because it is an active site of democratic engagement and negotiation that can contextualise the possible breadth and recent 73 decline of debates around land in England. Right to Roam makes an important intervention by forwarding these debates. Their work is broadening the English land question today. 74 Chapter 3: The trespassers ’answer In 2018, concluding his attempt to put “both the land question and Massey’s analysis of it back on the political and scholarly map,” Brett Christophers remarked how, “as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the people of Britain are increasingly being distanced — economically, socially and politically — from the land they inhabit.” (2018 xvi; 323) To his surprise, there have been “no concerted and broadly based moves to decommodify the land […] or even to provide social protections against the depredations of enclosure” (324). Any resistance “has remained highly localized, and has not spread”, and without “scaling into a meaningful, extra-local, widely visible and influential counter-movement”, these localised campaigns have failed to accrue “widely distributed support, socially and geographically” (2018 325-7, my emphasis). There is hope in Scotland, where the Land Reform Act 2003 and the establishment of the Scottish Land Commission in 2017 mark a new juncture for land reform, enabling a comprehensive right to roam and facilitating community acquisition of land through community land trusts (CLTs). However, these reforms have, so far, not put a dent in the high concentration of land ownership in Scotland, which continues to increase. In 2012, 440 landowners owned 50% of private rural land, further concentrated to 433 in 2024 (Sugden 2024; Wightman 2024). Even in England, which trails behind Scotland in terms of land reform, there is hope. Christophers references Shared Assets and Land for What? as spaces to engage with “the various meanings and uses of land… and the possibilities associated with different forms of 75 landownership” (2018 346). However, more funding for research and an English Land Commission would help coordinate these debates.24 Indeed, there is hope within Christophers’ contribution itself. Although The New Enclosure is focused on one aspect of the broader English land question, it is a generative foundation to broaden the English land question today. I paraphrase from its conclusion, in which Christophers offers up what would be needed to counter the commodification of land in Britain: 1. To invigorate national attachment and belonging to land, as the British public do “not regard land as genuinely, meaningfully theirs” (Christophers 2018 327); 2. To challenge the dominant property culture of Britain, including individual homeownership promoted through the Right to Buy introduced under the Thatcher government; 3. To fund research and further public discourse, increasing the political visibility of the English land question; 4. To demonstrate the social benefits of public and community owned land, including by holding public and private landowners accountable in accordance with their expected rationality as actors in the public, social or ecological interest; 5. To protect remaining common land; 6. To demonstrate the piecemeal nature of privatisation and enclosure. 24 Shared Assets has mapped the development of the land justice ‘movement’ in the UK, an incredibly helpful community resource for tracking activity and thematic interest in land justice organising, past and present (Swade 2021). The organisation provides ‘infrastructure’ for land justice campaigning, initially enabling Right to Roam to receive external funding before it was incorporated as a community interest company (CIC), ‘Wyld Service’ in April 2023 (Companies House filing history, accessed October 2023). 76 To broaden the land question therefore requires research, campaigning, and discursive interventions in national debates around property culture and land policy, followed by changes in both respects. Any attempt to build a socially visible, influential, popular and extra-local land movement should learn from the history of the English land question, which at its peak in the 1840s and 1870s had garnered national mass appeal, even if this was not reflected in the lack of substantive land reform. It should learn from the subsequent decline of the English land question in national discourse; and more specifically, how the land question debates have narrowed in scope, and why subsequent research and campaign work has so far failed to build traction. As I illustrated in the previous chapter, it should confront the institutional and longstanding constraints to land reform in England, engaging with broader concerns about the political economy of land and knowledge production specific to this context and entangled/responsible to others. These constraints are rooted in processes formulated during the English enclosure movement, and the cumulative effect of mass social, ecological, and epistemic dislocation from land relations. They are iteratively performed through acts of parliament, land registration infrastructure, and laws of trespass which limit the scope of the land question in political discourse. I have outlined some of these processes, using the concept of epistemic enclosure to bridge constraints to knowledge production and the denial of access to enclosed space. In this chapter, I continue to build upon Blomley’s idea that property relations are iteratively performed, conducting a performative analysis of a possible intervention in epistemic enclosure. 3.1. Introducing Right to Roam In 2020, two years after the publication of The New Enclosure, Guy Shrubsole co-founded the Right to Roam campaign with Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass. Following Christophers, I argue the campaign’s answer is significant for three reasons: 77 First, it engages with the land question at the national level, seeking a broad base of public support as it lobbies for land access reform. It deploys professional campaigning strategies such as intervention in parliamentary debates, organising petitions and rallies, commissioning national polls, lobbying, fundraising, and seeking a platform across mainstream and alternative media. To my knowledge, it is the only self-identified ‘land justice’ campaign to be mobilising this approach on the national stage. Second, Right to Roam cannot be accurately characterised as a recreational access campaign. While its legislative goal is in pursuit of a Right to Roam Act, it forwards a broad range of discourses arguing that greater access to enclosed land can cultivate greater belonging and responsible relationships to land. In the following analysis, I characterise Right to Roam as a relational access campaign, engaged with a set of broader concerns around issues of use, access, ownership and rights to land. Third, necessitated by its national focus and relational access approach, in the context of both the breadth and decline of the English land question, Right to Roam has taken on significant labour in educating the public about the scope of land justice, in turn broadening the land question. Through its broader discursive work and organising trespasses, often citing the research of Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes, it has attempted to broaden the land question on the national stage, perhaps inadvertently taking on outsized responsibility for defining its remit within national discourse. 3.2. Performative and conjunctural analysis Since The New Enclosure, I argue the campaign’s intervention in the English land question has been significant, and I do so through both performative and conjunctural analysis. As Stuart Hall defined in dialogue with Doreen Massey, a “conjuncture is a period during which the different 78 social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape” (2010 57). It is moved forward through crisis — a moment of potential change. We can conduct conjunctural analysis retrospectively to examine transition between political moments known as junctures, or whilst in the present conjuncture, when the moment has not yet been resolved or demarcated as a ‘period’. Deployed as a method, conjunctural analysis requires examining combinations of political moments and social forces to calculate “how to intervene effectively”, knowing there are a range of potential but ultimately unpredictable outcomes. To ask “how can we push the crisis from a compromise ending to a more radical rupture, or even a revolutionary resolution”, Hall and Massey argue we must first “analyse ruthlessly what sort of crisis it is.” (2010 58) As I will show, Right to Roam, like any national campaign, navigates the present conjuncture in order to intervene in it. There are land campaigns that have preceded, interact with, and will succeed Right to Roam, as I will demonstrate, but the campaign has gained national attention and broad-based support because of several overlapping crises that combine to make the present conjuncture. 25 What a conjunctural analysis offers is a way of analysing political, ideological, economic and cultural expression, “trying to think through the ways in which it’s been enrolled into the establishment of a particular kind of common sense” (Hall and Massey 2010 65). To broaden the land question, in order to achieve land reforms, requires understanding how contemporary English property culture is shaped. This is not only in the present, but, as Massey 25 The Covid-19 pandemic forced British society to examine inequities in access to green space. The UK’s exit from the European Union is a constitutional shift that has deeply affected legislative processes, including major reforms to agricultural policy. Simultaneously, major cultural shifts are taking place that are inextricable from such events, including discussions about racialised policing and policing under trespass precipitated by organising by campaigns such as Black Lives Matter and Kill the Bill, as well as reflections on Britain’s colonial legacy and English national identity. More recently, a change in government is opening up possibilities for new directions in policy. All the while, fossil fuels continue burning and biodiversity in Britain continues to collapse. There are also many more ways to characterise the current conjuncture. 79 herself previously indicates, through long-term historical processes. Building on Christophers’ criteria, I critically engage with Right to Roam by conducting a performative and conjunctural analysis of its activities so far. In this way, I consider how it answers the land question in light of its breadth and decline, considering how epistemic enclosure requires proportionate interventions. I argue the campaign is constrained by the narrowing of the land question, in part expressed through English property culture and therefore defined within political discourse. Despite significant headway made by the campaign, both the scope of public debate and public awareness of land injustices remain incredibly limited. Pursuing a conjunctural analysis, I show that Right to Roam’s policy interventions are indicative of what the national team understands is possible within the current political moment, while still offering discursive space to critique the mainstream recreational access framework. Pursuing a performative analysis, I argue that the campaign uses trespass to enable access, transparency, and accountability in defiance of enclosure and associated institutional constraints, but there is further scope to understand the English land question through broader political education. In the next chapter, I examine trespass more closely, considering how acts of trespass enable individuals to decommodify their relationships to land. First, I show how the campaign’s approach to trespass — and therefore who and what forms of trespass it enrolls — implicates how it contributes to the English land question on a national scale. Drawing on its publications, engagements with institutional, alternative and social media, as well as an interview conducted with campaign co-director Jon Moses, I examine how it answers the English land question through its production of knowledge and campaign strategy at national, local, historical, and international scales. Alongside its contributions, the ways in which the campaign remains constrained by the decline and narrowing of the land question are also generative. My analysis considers what further work must be done within a land justice movement, 80 including further research into the political economy of land in England.26 To what extent the Right to Roam campaign has contributed to this movement, or indeed to what extent it even can be said there is a land justice ‘movement’ in England, is an open question that begs the infancy of the campaign, the lack of resources available, and the narrow scope of land politics. Yet, as I show over the next two chapters, the land question is opening up. There are concrete spaces within which to discuss issues of ownership, access, and use. While enclosure persists, the extinguishment of land rights in England and Wales is still being contested. 3.3. More than manifestos In 2020, Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes co-founded the Right to Roam campaign. It effectively coincided with the publication of their respective books, Who Owns England in May 2019, and The Book of Trespass, in August 2020. Both charted as Sunday Times nonfiction bestsellers and engaged debate through nationwide book tours. Both seek to address the ‘secrecy’ of land ownership in England; challenge the notion that landowners’ should absolutely determine land use and shirk accountability mechanisms; and make a case for land reform through intentional acts of trespass. Acting as more than manifestos, these bodies of research have not only foregrounded the Right to Roam campaign, but substantially broadened the English land question in the present conjuncture. 26 In part due to the decline of the land question, and because this research is potentially situated in the early years of its revival, it is important to reflect on the fact that I owe a significant amount of my education to those who have organised as part of the Right to Roam campaign. While I can cite books, newspaper articles and social media posts, much of the knowledge I have gleaned to make this thesis possible cannot be represented through any citational language or attributed to individuals, but instead is credited to an emergent culture that characterises the land justice ‘movement’, and that Right to Roam has helped foster. 81 3.3.1. Debunking lies of the land While I discussed the Who Owns England investigation and book in the previous chapter, it is important to situate these within Shrubsole’s ongoing project of accountability of land users in England. Developing from this initial concern with the secrecy of land ownership in England, Shrubsole has examined the loss of temperate rainforest (and memory of it) in The Lost Rainforests of Britain; highlighted the importance of access reform with Right to Roam; and more recently, The Lie of the Land, a book published in September 2024 challenging landowners’ often uncontested claim to ‘stewardship’.27 It marks his strongest intervention in the English land question yet, and continues to shape Right to Roam’s strategic decisions. Having engaged with Massey and Christophers previously, he here cites Christophers as he explains how “the small-state ethos of Thatcher, Ridley and co. successfully closed down debate about the public ownership of land for a generation”, also implicating the New Labour governments that presided over land privatisation (2024 91). Taking a genealogical approach, he expands on Christophers to demonstrate how discourses of stewardship became significant during the English enclosure movement. For Shrubsole, trespass acts as a mechanism for accountability despite the decline of the land question, circumventing institutional and discursive constraints that prohibit transparency — including the land registration infrastructure he is intimately familiar with. Rather than simply rehearsing the relationship between the Kinder Scout and Winter Hill mass trespasses of 1932, and the expansion of access reforms such as the Rights of Way Act 1932, he shows how landowners exploited this relationship to justify exclusive ownership as ‘stewards’, limiting the scope of the land question. They not only prevented the implementation of the Act, but crafted a new narrative: that if the public were let into the countryside, they would mess it up. Mobs of ramblers in walking boots, clutching Ordnance Survey maps, might not be 27 This most recent book is dedicated to his co-organisers in the Right to Roam national team. 82 quite as threatening as Captain Swing’s rioting peasants, but they still posed a challenge to the landed order. ‘Townsmen seem to have the mentality of serfs,' ran one 1936 article in Country Life, the magazine of the landed gentry. ‘They act as uneducated slaves might be expected to act when suddenly liberated. They have no sense of responsibility towards the countryside.’ Landowners, by contrast, cast themselves as responsible stewards, a bulwark against rampaging hordes of townies with their litter and uncouth manners. It is a narrative that persists today. In a similar vein to Fisher’s work on agricultural manuals or Baker’s analysis of criminalisation under trespass during the 19th century, Shrubsole therefore brings in an important class analysis. Who gets to decide how land is used? Who sets the terms of the debate? Who defines the land question? All of these considerations are critical to his argument: that enclosure has narrowed democratic possibility, and, as his data and campaign work with others has shown, so has the co-constitutive epistemic enclosure — the continuous denial of customary practice through the performance of private property over time. Guy Shrubsole is arguably the most active voice shaping the English land question in contemporary political discourse, appearing on mainstream media and intervening in national policy debates through his campaigning, investigative work and book projects. The Right to Roam campaign is clearly informed by his experience in campaign and policy, having previously worked at Rewilding Britain, Friends of the Earth, in the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and New Zealand’s Ministry for Agriculture. For instance, in 2024, after his investigative research revealed 355 landowners are exempt from inheritance tax on landed property, he lobbied chancellor Rachel Reeves to put an end to the tax-exempt heritage assets scheme and therefore close a loophole worth £68 million (Horton 2024). Such interventions into the land question give a sense of permanence and authority to the campaign’s broader political agenda. While Reeves did not close the loophole, her subsequent reforms to agricultural property relief in the 2024 Autumn Budget did provide Shrubsole (and Right to Roam) an opportunity to platform the land question on the national scale, demonstrating to the public that the politics of the 83 countryside is the politics of land, and specifically, land access. NFU President Tom Bradshaw said Reeves’ new measures were a “stab in the back” (Partridge, Horton and Elgot 2024). But Shrubsole pointed out — to James O’Brien, host of national radio show LBC — that during his research for Lie of the Land he found every NFU President since the 1970s has used this same phrase — ‘We are the custodians of the countryside’ — and it was in order to deflect the tensions away from the very legitimate concerns of environmentalists and the public, of the impacts of industrialised agriculture, intensive shooting, modern forestry, on our wildlife and our habitat. O’Brien: It’s an incredible contradiction of what isn’t just a party line for the NFU, but it’s probably seeped into public consciousness really effectively, hasn’t it? It’s almost unchallenged. Shrubsole: Massively so, and you see that in much of the media coverage of the recent protests, of the whole debacle about agricultural property relief, and portrayals of farming more generally. I think the media has portrayed a very distorted view of the countryside, how land is used, and who owns it. [...] I want to help spark a conversation about land reform in England. [...] this is about democracy, accountability, transparency, it’s about all of us having more of a say over how land is used, and really holding to account more of the big landowners who we don’t often hear about. (LBC 2024) In doing so, Shrubsole’s intervention into the English land question has come head-to-head with the landowning lobby and the English political establishment, who have kept agricultural land management distinct from the politics of landownership and land relations, narrowing the scope of debate. Those who own land continue to define the English land question. For those who don’t, trespass acts as an intervention. 3.3.2. Writing trespass Nick Hayes’ contribution is an incredibly broad sweeping analysis of English property culture, which he describes as ‘a cult of exclusion’. Compared to Shrubsole’s work, Hayes makes a more explicit case for embodied acts of trespass to reveal “the lines that divide us”, linking property relations to socio-spatial inequalities, including transatlantic slavery and the 84 criminalisation of Gypsy, Traveller, and Romani cultural practices (Hayes 2020). Weaving historical narrative with autoethnographic accounts of his trespasses, he offers readers (including legal and cultural geographers) new language to understand private property as performed: a “legal force-field, a man-made spell” that “camouflages its importance to us, it naturalizes the unnatural” (2020 19 and 377 in Noterman and Blomley 2024 241-242). Of particular interest to this study, the “mindwall has become so entrenched in our heads that it remains unchallenged and unquestioned”, “and we obey it because we see it without its context.” (Hayes 2020 122, my emphasis) Like Shrubsole, Hayes understands this context as the historic enclosure and commodification of land over time, often explicitly stating property is performed. As co-founders of the campaign, their complementary contributions went on to shape Right to Roam’s communication strategies, particularly early on, also serving to recruit their readership into campaign activities. Right to Roam’s strategies work together to perform or make visible a heterogeneity of land relations. Through embodied and ideally repetitive acts of trespass, participants are able to hold landowners accountable for their use of land, but through also confronting their ‘mindwall’ can interact with the performativity of property as it is revealed through diverse land relations. Right to Roam organises trespasses at different scales. While mass trespasses are large and well-publicised, attracting anywhere between 30 to thousands of people, others are conducted by a smaller, local group or even by individuals, although these are less likely to receive national media attention. But it is through the repeated performance of trespass that one’s ‘mindwall’ is deconstructed, revealing and legitimising a more heterogeneous scope of property relations. Given this embodied shift, participants in Right to Roam activities are likely to perform property differently outside of those activities, as I explore in the next chapter. Right to Roam is not the 85 only campaign deploying the tactic of trespass. The Sheffield Hunt Saboteurs use it to reveal violations of the Hunting Act 2004, and even make citizen arrests. However, for Right to Roam, acts of trespass are not only mechanisms for accountability but for public education, linking histories of enclosure in England, the political economy of empire and slavery, land management practices, and folk knowledge. They take place on aristocratic estates, private gardens in cities, and in reservoirs and rivers. Participants’ knowledge of land relations inform site-specific ‘stories’, justify acts of trespass, and resignify meanings within enclosed space as part of a collective social environment, constituting heterogeneous performances of property. These acts of trespass are bolstered by a larger epistemic culture that in some cases explicitly draws on a memory of the English enclosure movement. Hayes edited The Trespassers’ Companion published in 2022, a practical guide to recruit individuals into acts of trespass. Akin to the Who Owns England investigation, which encourages readers to source and interpret open source data, the book is accompanied by a website, inviting campaign supporters to submit stories of their “performative” trespasses: The trespasses on this website work best if (alongside personal accounts of what you have seen, how you felt) you give some of the context of the land, its historic ownership, when it was enclosed and discuss its modern context, such as footpaths that have recently been shut off. (Trespass Trip Advisor, 2022) Trespass is therefore not only a form of research into the effects of concentrated land ownership, but reveals the performative power of exclusionary and disciplinary property relations on the body, a form of embodied knowledge that varies between locations and participants. To reveal and contest the piecemeal nature of land commodification, we need to move beyond Christophers’ ‘extra-local’ framing to an multiscalar approach, examining and performing land relations at national, local, international scales, and the scale of the individual — concurrently. 86 3.2.3. A culture of trespass Beyond Shrubsole and Hayes, Right to Roam’s culture of knowledge production through trespass has expanded with the addition of new organisers, the interests of local groups, and interactions with other land campaigns. For instance, I first encountered the Right to Roam campaign in a profile published by The Guardian in November 2021. Jonathan Moses (the third member of Right to Roam’s national team) enters into conversation with Dave Bangs (“guerrilla botanist” and co-founder of Landscapes of Freedom), discussing how land access is critical to environmental conservation. The high concentration of land ownership in England means diverse ecologies are enclosed to us, and therefore, Bangs argues, “no one knows it, no one loves it, and if no one loves it no one is going to fight for it.” Through acts of trespass, Bangs has refined his botanical knowledge, witnessing the decline of biodiversity and mismanagement of land. Bangs: “Because I know this countryside so well, I can talk with authority about it to anyone. If a landowner comes and challenges me, it’s very often the case that I know a lot more than they do about their site [...] You can be as mad as you like, but they can’t deny you that authority.” Moses: This knowledge, he believes, gives trespassers a moral authority – as nature’s guardians, whistleblowers and advocates – counteracting the tendency to treat them as invaders of the land, or as a danger to it. (Moses 2021) Intentional acts of trespass not only challenge one’s ‘mindwall’ and the authority of asset-rich landowners, but are understood as avenues to develop one’s knowledge of land relations within enclosed space, circumventing and revealing the concentration of land ownership in England. Indeed, a few months earlier in July 2021, Right to Roam had collaborated with Landscapes of Freedom to organise its first mass trespass in the South Downs, attended by around 300-400 people. 28 The campaigns platformed a broad range of perspectives on trespass including 28 This trespass and further campaigning by the Brighton Downs Alliance was credited when, in November 2022, Brighton and Hove City Council declared the nearby Waterhall public access land with a right to roam. 87 Shrubsole; Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society and vice president of the Ramblers Association; and Ruth Sullivan, a representative of Travellers’ Alliance. Ruth spoke to the impending Policing Bill, and specifically the law around trespass, which impacts everyone around access to land, wild camping, living freely, roaming freely on the land. But for Romani Travellers, Irish Travellers specifically, it is an act of cultural genocide. Now it will become illegal to stop anywhere with the intent to reside. And what that means for Traveller families is that they can have their house seized, they can face imprisonment, they can face impossible fines — £2000 plus in fines — and for our community, there’s no safety net underneath that. (Bill 2023 at 22:12 - 23:12) Before the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act was finalised in 2022, this law of trespass had threatened to criminalise those racialised for living in roadside encampments, as well as certain protestors, walkers and wild campers. At the beginning of the campaign, Right to Roam’s answer to the English land question reflected a heterogeneity of land relations, forwarding perhaps the first campaign to unify recreational and residential uses of private land in recent memory. This would not last. As I will show, the campaign’s discursive contributions to the English land question highlight the significant limits of the recreational access framework. However, the national policy arena continues to perpetuate these divisions, and as I argue, must be challenged through further interventions. Once the final version of the Police Act was passed in 2022, the campaign strategically focused its efforts in pursuit of a Right to Roam Act. Modelled off the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, this proposal is compatible with the English legal system and legible within mainstream political discourse. However, the campaign has consistently articulated the Act in relation to broader aspects of the English land question, pursuing a relational rather than purely recreational approach to land access, use, ownership and rights. Technically, it is not asking state bodies for a reinstatement of now-extinguished common rights, but it is explicitly invoking a 88 ‘culture of the commons’ through a memory of customary practices (Hayes 2022). Given the breadth of the land question, and the campaign’s extra-local platform and relational access approach, it is worth deconstructing how Right to Roam has styled itself as a “single issue” campaign through its proposal for a Right to Roam Act (interview with Jon Moses, 2023). This analysis should help inform even broader interventions into the English land question. 3.4. A single-issue campaign? While rooted in Shrubsole and Hayes’ work, the campaign has since developed its discursive scope and national influence in pursuit of a Right to Roam Act, including by expanding its national campaign team and adding local groups. In this section, I draw on primary research and an interview with Jon Moses, co-director of Right to Roam, exploring how the campaign has defined its strategic vision, discourses, trespass, and therefore answered the land question over the past four years. Jon Moses is employed by the campaign as one of two full-time national organisers, and following research in geohumanities and campaign work, has been vocal on the need for natural education and to pluralise the politics of the countryside. 29 The other is Nadia Shaikh, a conservationist who platforms decolonial approaches to the sector. Further current members of the national team include Guy Shrubsole; biologist and nature writer Amy-Jane Beer; geographer Lewis Winks; and outdoor influencer Jess Day, who manages campaign communications. In 29 In his doctoral thesis, which examines the formation of the British pub since 1979, he concludes that a project of “a counter-ecology of re-enchantment” could remedy alienation within Britain, including a “revivification of institutions of belonging” and “landscape rights”, including an “expansion of the right to roam”, “education in perception”, “new, material rituals”, reforms in secondary education, and the “[r]ejuvenation, expansion and enhanced protections for unique features of national/regional cultures.” (246) He argues “a phenomenological approach to reenchantment can ground identity in a material relationship to place which offers more than discursive, representational gestures of belonging. In Britain, the pub, as both a symbol and a space, a signifier of identity and a forum for its expression, offers a powerful place to start.” (2019 247) 89 December 2024, the campaign posted on its website that it has a “Parliament of Owls to advise, inspire, challenge and oversee our work’, including Nick Hayes; Caroline Lucas, former leader and MP of the Green Party; sustainability specialist Soraya Abdel-Hadi; nature writer Jay Griffiths and Robert McFarlane; and Mary-Anna Ochota, president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England; and “nature, represented by Paul Powlesland”, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers interested in advancing the rights of nature in the English legal system (Right to Roam website 2024). Other members have included Harry Jenkinson, a researcher and co-founder of land access collective Landscapes of Freedom; and Maria Fernandez Garcia, founder of foraging school Healing Weeds. Each member has contributed their knowledge to Right to Roam. This has carried over to Wild Service, which, launched in 2024, indicates the future direction of the national campaign and its explicit interest in internationalist, specifically Indigenous, land justice struggles. In response to demand from supporters, Right to Roam began developing infrastructure for the formation of local groups, including ‘Know Your Rights While Trespassing’ workshops and regular meetings with a member of the national team. The first ‘Know Your Rights’ workshop was held in Bristol in October 2022, and was followed by the addition of local groups in Brighton, Cambridge, Norwich, London, Greater Manchester and the Peak District, and Glasgow in 2023; and Newcastle, Oxford, Sheffield, Birmingham and the West Midlands, Wiltshire and Somerset, Kernow in Cornwall, and Herefordshire, in 2024. While some groups are more active than others, this infrastructure has facilitated recruitment; moves towards political education; and more trespasses across the country. Therefore, Right to Roam takes an extra-local approach, facilitating trespasses that engage participants in the performance of property at the scale of the body, as I explore in Chapter IV. 90 In this chapter, I focus on the discursive breadth of Right to Roam, and, critically, the importance of a broad approach to the English land question through further movement building. The question of what makes Right to Roam a “single issue campaign” reveals the extent to which the land question must be more broadly revived and engaged beyond the campaign itself. I asked Jon what influence he believes the campaign has had on the politics of land in England: It’s part of a much wider project of putting land back on the agenda. [...] We’re probably one of the few campaigns that is very explicitly interacting with the political sphere on it. [...] I think it has helped that there is an active and dynamic political campaign around land issues, I think that’s helped energise things a little bit, but it’s also bigger than us as well. We’re just part of the zeitgeist. I would like it if there was more—I think sometimes people refer to ‘the land movement’ at the moment, I don’t think there is a land movement. I don’t think there’s enough political projects and campaigning happening, beyond all the stuff we’re doing on access, for instance. There’s a little bit from the Landworkers’ Alliance around food, but I wouldn’t say it’s a movement yet. It’s a reviving culture and that could become a movement politically, if it wants to be. So it need to go beyond access? Yeah. I can see a lot of campaigns that I would be doing if I wasn’t trying to finish the job on this. Ultimately, this takes up a lot of time, and there’s only so many of us. Sometimes I get a bit frustrated — we’ve been criticised ‘you’re focusing on access issues, what about rural evictions’. [...] Sometimes I get a bit annoyed with my peers in the activist scene saying ‘you should be doing this’, well actually, why don’t you? That’s just a personal gripe. [...] We’ve kept the national group to eight people — I guess that’s another organisational philosophy we have — which is not getting too big, because part of the ability to be fast and dynamic and keep a sense of collective trust amongst the organisers, I think, is contingent on being small. (Interview with Jon Moses, October 2023) As discussed in the previous chapter, the English land question had once been a wide-ranging set of debates that galvanised popular engagement. Yet, due to its simultaneous breadth and decline, any campaign seeking to intervene at the national level and recruit mass support would first need to facilitate some form of public education to explain the importance of land ownership in everyday life. As Christophers suggests, it would need to invigorate public attachment and belonging to 91 land, increasing the political visibility of land politics. With its more-than-manifestos acting as a generative headstart, Right to Roam continued to cultivate the foundations for this. Expressing its commitment to access for all, its website states it will present a campaign [that] actively eschews partisan divisions. A full Right to Roam will benefit everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Just as importantly, we will actively pursue a non-exclusionary campaign, and seek to engage with as many people as possible, from all backgrounds. (Accessed September 2023) In my political memory of the UK, Right to Roam is the first national campaign seeking broad-based, mass public appeal and consideration of land justice in England, rooted in its broad discursive contributions and pursuit of a comprehensive right to roam. Bolstered by a slick campaign strategy, this approach has proved successful in shaping public opinion. In July 2023, a YouGov poll — commissioned by the campaign — found 74% of Labour voters, 66% of Liberal Democrats and 56% of Conservatives would support a Scottish-style right to roam in England (Vaughan 2023). On this basis, it has won mass cross-partisan support for a Right to Roam Act, which would introduce a ‘default of inclusion’ to replace the ‘default of exclusion’ instituted by the Countryside Rights of Way Act 2000 (hereafter, “CRoW Act”). Such an expansive campaign need not always produce difficulties within a broader movement. But as Jon accurately describes, Right to Roam is the only land justice campaign intervening at the crucial national scale with such public visibility. The difficulties it navigates in coordinating broader perspectives on land reform therefore reveal important characteristics about the scope of the English land question today: In theory, Right to Roam is a politically expansive issue [...] I would say some of the local groups have a more traditional activist milieu and demographic, whereas others are more expansive and sometimes quite random. [...] We have people involved in local groups who are from what would be seen as the opposing end of countryside cultural politics, but nonetheless are supportive of open access rights. I think that’s something the campaign’s navigated more and more — how do you keep that expansiveness, and when do you draw the line? At certain moments, we’ve made choices, say around the rights of GRT [Gypsy 92 Roma Traveller] people. You know that’s going to put off a lot of right wing supporters if we come out in favour of Gypsy Roma Traveller rights, but we do anyway because it’s morally, ethically, part of our values. We think we can’t understand this issue without understanding the situation of the GRT community and that history, because that’s absolutely implicated in the history of trespass. We’ll pick and choose where we highlight other issues and bring them into the campaign. But obviously if you pile on every single issue going, all you’re doing is ultimately losing more and more people, so it’s ultimately a kind of balancing act. In the end it’s a single issue campaign, and it’s oriented towards getting political change, political victory, and we’re mindful of that. (Interview with Jon Moses, 2023) While Jon asserts that Right to Roam is a single issue campaign, characterised by its focus on achieving a ‘default of inclusion’, its broader scope of discourses reveal the breadth of the English land question. Rather than adopting the typical position of recreational access, it forwards an approach of relational access for all. I am interested in the tension between the discursive breadth this generates and its self-identification as a single issue campaign. The strategic decisions the campaign makes, as Jon illustrates above, reveal the consequences of how the English land question has narrowed in scope over time, resulting in an institutionally constrained political environment. I argue that if Right to Roam self-identifies as a single issue campaign, it must also be understood to enrol a broader land question. At the time of writing, a Right to Roam Act has not been enacted. But beyond this single ask, the campaign’s discursive contributions and trespasses have affected how property relations are understood and performed in England at a national scale, including by invoking a memory of the English enclosure movement and moving towards a ‘New English Countryside’. Following Hall and Massey’s conjunctural analysis, I argue that through this historical knowledge of land injustice in England, Right to Roam effectively intervenes in the current political conjuncture and performs English property culture anew. Yet despite Right to Roam’s work, not all have benefited. This indicates both the scope of its answer to the English land question, and the way epistemic enclosure continues to constrain contestations to the 93 commodification of land and knowledge in England today. A genealogy of ‘trespass’, as I continue from the last chapter, shows us how we can all perform property differently. 3.4.1. Who trespasses? The campaign’s first action was a national petition launched in 2020, calling on the UK Government not to criminalise trespass under the then-proposed Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Bill. This juncture, powerfully shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic, set up the campaign in three significant ways. First, Shrubsole and Hayes had actively organised as part of the Land Justice Network which, established in 2017, became dormant during the early stages of the pandemic (Swade 2021).30 Second, the enforcement of a national lockdown revealed inequalities in access to green space, recruiting mass appeal for access reform at an early stage of the campaign. Third, the domination of coronavirus in national discourse provided a test case for Right to Roam to situate and define the scope of its campaign goals and platform the land question in competitive conditions. As Burgum, Jones and Powell write, “the criminalisation of trespass has not spurred much debate and has been somewhat sidelined in public, media and public discourse – first by Brexit and then the urgencies of the COVID-19 pandemic.”31 (2022 1220) 30 The network included the Landworkers’ Alliance, a national union expanding beyond ‘farmers’; Land In Our Names (LION), a racial and land justice grassroots collective concerned with land reparations; the People’s Land Policy, building from the Landworkers’ Alliance People’s Food Policy to develop a Land Reform Act for England and Wales; Resisting Anti-Trespass, a squatting campaign housing rough sleepers, which has since developed into the Autonomous Winter Shelter; Three Acres and a Cow, a travelling performance outlining a history of land rights in England; authors of Land for the Many, an independent policy report commissioned by the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership; and Shared Assets, a ‘think-and-do-tank’ providing infrastructure for land justice organising across Britain. Out of engaged dialogue with these groups, notably at the ‘Take Back the Land Camp’, in May 2019, which occupied part of the 16,000 acre Walshaw Estate in Yorkshire, Shrubsole and Hayes began to construct an initial strategy for Right to Roam. 31 Kill the Bill and Resist Anti Trespass were concerted campaigns against the Police Bill, mobilising thousands in protest from 2021 to 2022. To my knowledge, they are no longer active under these names. 94 In 2019, after public consultation, the Conservative Party had pledged to “make intentional trespass a criminal offence”, part of a longstanding agenda dating back to the introduction of the Public Order Act 1986 under Thatcher (Conservative and Unionist Party 2019 19). In 2020, in anticipation of further legislative process, Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes mobilised national support against this proposal, announcing a petition to halt plans for the new legislation: Trespassers cannot, in fact, be prosecuted – at least, not yet. [...] That’s because trespass is a civil offence, not a criminal one – and has been for a thousand years. But perhaps not for much longer (Shrubsole 2020).32 Drawing from the Home Office consultation entitled ‘Strengthening police powers to tackle unauthorised encampments’, which outlined its attempt to criminalise “intentional trespass” Shrubsole identified all the possible groups that could be affected, including Gypsies, Travellers and Romani communities; those who establish protest camps; ‘wild’ campers; as well as “ramblers, wild swimmers, kayakers, climbers, mountain bikers and any member of the public who dared stray from the path” (Shrubsole 2020). Alongside Shrubsole and Hayes, a broad cross-section of campaigns for recreational access and the rights of Gypsies and Travellers, notably Friends, Families, Travellers, successfully introduced arguments into Parliament. With these causes united, campaigners and parliamentarians alike were also debating these freedoms together. Katherine Fletcher, then Conservative MP for South Ribble, spoke to Shrubsole’s petition: [Shrubsole] has a series of concerns about unintended consequences for countryside lovers and those who seek to reside in it. In his view, criminalising intentional trespass could lead to, although not exclusively: prosecuting ramblers who stray from the path by accident [...] preventing participation in wild camping, even for personal safety or enjoyment; limiting the right to peaceful protest; and forging new paths in the countryside. Guy is also keen to highlight the wider implications of criminalising intentional trespass on the lives of Traveller communities across the country. (HC Deb April 19 2021) 32 Shrubsole is right to point out signs denoting ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ are misleading — walking as trespassing is by itself is not a criminal offence — but other acts of ‘aggravated’ trespass have historically been criminalised, a reflection of property logics contingent over time and space, as discussed in the previous chapter (Baker 2019). When it comes to defining ‘aggravated trespass’ and what constitutes harm to property, there is racialised bias against use of land for inhabitation. 95 At its earliest stages, Right to Roam had brought together concerns for ‘wild’ camping and nomadic rights under the Government’s vague definition of ‘unauthorised encampment’, and thus trespass. Fletcher continues: [A]t the heart of the debate is a key phrase: “to intentionally reside”. In many cases, a lost walker has no intent to reside unlawfully on a farmer’s field. When discussing this further, Guy’s experience of wild camping in Dartmoor is a potential model. Stays there are restricted to a maximum of two nights, which prevents a camper from establishing intent to reside, and arguably they are at no risk of committing trespass by that account. (HC Deb April 19 2021) In one of the campaign’s first media appearances publicising the campaign, Hayes and Shrubsole discuss this context, understanding nomadic communities as minorities: Shrubsole: It’s getting to such an extreme level of prejudice and persecution of minorities here, but also others who choose to take on that lifestyle, to protester camps […] all of the innocently criminalised. If the Government got their way with this manifesto commitment they’ve made to criminalise trespass, it would be incredibly draconian. Hayes: I think the right of people to be able to camp is associated with the historic enclosure of land, in that some of the benefits of having access to land [is] once I’ve fenced it, I can sell them back to you. That’s what a campsite is. It’s just a patch of land that I’ve told you first ‘you can’t camp on’, and then I’ve said, ‘Well you can camp here if you pay me some money for it.’ [...] When I’ve gone wild camping, or just sleeping rough, basically, without the tent, you wake up at dawn and the birds are crazy loud. You fall back to sleep again and the sun wakes you up. You feel more embedded in nature, and more calm than this middle class brand of the countryside. (It’s Not The Length, 2020 31:15 - 34:00) In this early introduction to the campaign, Shrubsole and Hayes discuss the potential implications of the Police Bill across types of unauthorised encampment, and therefore across social groups. Gypsies, Travellers, Roma, ‘New Age’ travellers, protestors, and wild campers are understood as ‘innocently criminalised’ for trespassing through unauthorised encampment, as in parliamentary debates. In this account, recreational access, achieved through the commodification of land through acts of enclosure, is delineated from ‘wild’ camping. In a clear critique of the liberal recreational access framework, and a broader pursuit of belonging in land, Right to Roam 96 campaigns through Hayes’ byline phrase: by “crossing the lines that divide us” (Hayes 2020). Thus Right to Roam was conceived as an intervention into the land question that was more expansive than its neighbours, including the Ramblers Association, who maintain and protect footpaths for recreational land use, or campaigns focused on housing and race, which forgo — or at least do not publicly platform — a memory of land dispossession within England. Speaking across social groups, against their criminalisation and land commodification, it pursues what I call a relational approach to access. The petition closed with 134,933 signatures, passing the threshold for a general debate in Parliament. The final version of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, passed in 2022 stopped short of criminalising all forms of intentional trespass, with ramblers and wild campers unaffected. Yet, continuing a centuries-old trend, new provisions broadened the definition of trespass with a vehicle, a euphemism for mobile homes, further criminalising nomadic ways of life practiced by people racialised as Gypsies, Travellers or Roma. While Right to Roam’s initial protest had successfully broadened the debate around trespass, appealing to a collective sense of belonging and land attachment, ultimately the Police Act reproduced pre-existing divisions between land use for recreation and for customary use. As I have discussed, in the development of the Public Order Act 1986, parliamentary debates had likewise distinguished between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ trespass, prompted by members of the public who had trespassed in defiance of a High Court injunction in order to exercise customary use of Stonehenge. Douglas Hurd MP had recommended government ministers meet with the NFU and the Ramblers as they “search for a way of distinguishing between [legitimate, recreational trespassers] and the undoubted mischiefs” (HC Deb June 3 1986). 97 Over time, and in a more concerted fashion, laws of trespass have continued to criminalise Gypsy, Traveller and Romani communities under as part of a what has been called a ‘civilising offensive’, “mirroring practices of ‘othering’ inherent in European colonialism and modernity” (Powell 2007; Burgum Jones Powell 2022 1220). In vocalising its support for Gypsy, Traveller and Romani communities, Right to Roam has taken steps to resist this division. Indeed, engagement with historical injustice and notions of belonging is what a relational (rather than recreational) approach demands. Every year since the Act, the campaign has acknowledged International Roma Day on its Instagram account, and cites their ongoing persecution within their more detailed historical narratives of enclosure. In an interview with Novara Media, a left-leaning platform, in 2023, Jon Moses explained that the Police Act 2022 is a deeply racist bit of legislation. No doubt if that evolves, it would go to dispossessing and criminalising all acts of trespass. I’ve no doubt about that, if we were facing more Tory rule. That’s a warning to middle class people who think that struggle’s nothing about them, it absolutely is. (Novara FM 37:00-37:30) Speaking before the general election of 2024, in his view another Conservative government would continue their longstanding attempt to criminalise all forms of trespass, with the Police Act 2022 acting as precedent. Indeed, Right to Roam therefore has an interest in addressing what is here characterised as a unified struggle. Yet since the Police Act was enacted, the campaign has not revised right to roam legislation as mirrored in Scotland. While contributing discursively, it has not contributed to campaigning around policy. In this sense, Right to Roam could be considered a single issue campaign, responding to what it understands as possible within the current performances of legitimate or illegitimate trespass: a division reproduced in political discourse that reflects longstanding normative constraints to the English land question, as I argued in the previous chapter. The ongoing criminalisation of nomadic ways of life practiced by Gypsy, Traveller and Romani communities is an acute example of epistemic enclosure, the denial of customary practice 98 under what should be understood as a racial regime of ownership (Bhandar 2018). The campaign understands this history. While the debate was a juncture in which to engage across the spectrum of property relations, with organisations led by or representing nomadic communities in England, such as Friends, Families and Travellers, participating, the campaign has not publicly collaborated with them since. I am interested in a particular tension — the question of what makes Right to Roam a “single issue campaign” and its interest in pursuing relational access — and how this reveals the extent to which the land question must be more broadly revived and engaged with and beyond the campaign itself. Other collaborations have proved useful in organising trespasses, widening recruitment, and even mobilising national support against a particularly significant case of enclosure. The British Mountaineering Council has taken on the labour of campaigning for the Right to Roam Act in Wales. Localised hiking groups for people of colour and queer people, including Peaks of Colour and Hiking in Skirts, have co-organised trespasses and public film screenings with Right to Roam (although they primarily focus their labour towards healing relationships between marginalised peoples and rural lands, and therefore tend not to use trespass). As part of its development of Wild Service, Right to Roam has enrolled the River Roding Trust, Wild Justice, Wild Card, River Action and Trash Free Trails to facilitate educational workshops and forward its conception of guardianship. A partnership with natural cosmetics company Lush contributed to the campaign’s national presence, developing a soap to raise funds and distribute its manifesto. In particular, Right to Roam’s close collaboration with campaign The Stars Are For Everyone has contested an enclosure of customary, recreational rights on Dartmoor National Park, in turn securing Right to Roam’s status as a household name. With these campaigns falling within the general scope of recreational access, these collaborations may have contributed to wider 99 perceptions that national campaigners are principally concerned with recreational access, rather than the broader land relation and culture it has carefully outlined in books and interventions in strategic sites of action. For instance, Nick Hayes has been actively involved in Esme Boggart, a local campaign against the rural eviction of a family by the Mapledurham Estate in Oxfordshire. Alongside ‘Kinder in Colour’, which commemorated the 90th anniversary of the Kinder Scout mass trespass, Nadia Shaikh has organised several ‘walkshops’ for Black people and people of colour to redress racial inequality in the countryside (@right.2roam, Instagram post, April 15 2023). Technically outside the campaign’s focus on a Right to Roam Act, these signify campaigners’ commitment to relational access for all, bleeding into campaign discourses. Jon explains their approach: For a long time the conversation around access to nature has been held in a recreational framework, and by and large, the recreational framework of access has lent itself to demographics that tend to be white middle class people who are often retired. So there’s this idea of going hiking, getting your ski poles out, that’s all kinda good fun and what not. That’s not really what the campaign’s ever been about. We’re trying to look at access to nature in a more expansive way and a less culturally prescribed way, and so we’re particularly interested in those groups that are left out of that vision of the countryside, left out of that vision of what a relationship to nature looks like. Obviously, at the moment, the conversation around land access and nature is becoming much more diverse and expansive because of the work of loads of other groups beyond ourselves. It seems we’d be missing a trick not to be engaged in those conversations and having relationships there. To us, it’s all part of the same story, the same journey, which is overhauling the monocultural relationship both to the land — the monoculture of agriculture and all the rest of it — but also to land culture and rural society. I think the big meta vision here is diversity in all senses, in an ecological sense and in a human sense, and trying to fight back against the steamroller of homogenisation that run off against the landscape. That’s the deeper work. (Interview with Jon Moses, 2023) Right to Roam thus aims to move beyond recreational to relational access, and consistently uses the discourse of a ‘monoculture’ to describe the need to diversify land debates and reforms around land use in England, in light of what I call epistemic enclosure: the denial of customary use. While the campaign has developed a unique national platform for its broad discourses and campaign, in 100 the face of historic constraints, it has made strategic decisions about how it answers the land question through its practical interventions. As I enter into a multiscalar analysis, the breadth and decline of the English land question in the current conjuncture becomes clearer, as does the need for a coordinated, programmatic answer. 3.5. At what scale? 3.5.1. National Right to Roam’s pursuit of relational access has challenged the dominant property culture of England at the national scale, including through mass trespasses designed to garner national attention. In comparison to recent national campaigns such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, which primarily focus on “staging image events for social/media dissemination” (Deluca 2021 216), Right to Roam forwards a robust and wide-ranging culture of education and re-enchantment, articulating trespass as directly proportional to its goal of a comprehensive right to roam. In other words, access to land is understood as access to place-based knowledge, retained in part through the folk culture that remains. This theme was particularly prominent in the well-publicised ‘Dance of the Commons’ in 2022, situated on land owned by Richard Benyon, then the Government’s access to nature minister. The trespass featured morris dancing, a traditional English folk dance, as well as costume dress and various rituals. Captured by the artist Grayson Perry in his documentary series ‘Full English’, which explored the complexity of English national identity after Brexit, this trespass signified the importance of customary memory within the campaign’s vision of a ‘New English Countryside’ and contributed to Right to Roam’s national presence. For Shaikh, it was a glimpse of how people in England would have used the commons. We shared stories of wildlife, gave offerings to the earth. Inspired by wild things, we decorated 101 ourselves; sat under an oak tree, we simply loved deeply and opened our hearts. When land is not commodified and shared, magic happens. (Weird Walk, 2022 41) In an interview about the day, Hayes expands on the importance of folk culture in their performance of property: There’s a real yearning for English indigeneity and it’s really tricky because we’re just coming to terms with the idea that England colonised and destroyed other cultures and exploited their indigeneity. But we’re kind of forgetting that there was an English wisdom of the land and knowledge of flora and fauna, a craft and a culture that we had, that was our indigeneity. [...] The Conservatives are desperate for us to be this one crop, just one type of person. What we’re saying is that English folk culture has got nothing to do with race or gender. In fact, the spirit of the commons encourages diversity, inclusion, mutation, weirdness, feyness, whimsy – all the kinds of stuff that is actually quite threatening to monoculture. (Spooner 2022) The national team would continue to invoke the concept of indigeneity in forging a new English identity in their introduction of Wild Service, although less explicitly in relation to places subject to the British Empire. I will explore this shortly. For now, I focus on what Hayes’ comment signifies about its national platform. Situated on Benyon’s land, the invocation of folk culture within this vision is not understood as a distraction from its message to Westminster, but a broader engagement with the construction of English national identity. Indeed, it paved the way for the re-introduction of a Right to Roam Act in parliamentary discourse. In October 2023, after meeting with Benyon, Caroline Lucas, then Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, tabled a motion for a Right to Roam Bill to be heard in the Commons based on the campaign’s draft legislation. In an interview with The Guardian, she agreed with Right to Roam’s strategy of trespass: I think they have been incredibly responsibly done. [...] I think that it’s filling a part of this vacuum that I was referring to in terms of the lack of information and education coming from anywhere else. So I think that it makes a really important political point. I think it gives people the confidence to feel that yes, we have a right to be able to access nature. (Horton 2022) It was unlikely to be passed under a Conservative government that, until recently, had sought to criminalise all forms of intentional trespass. But Lucas’ actions, and the trespass that preceded it, 102 signalled Right to Roam were strategically engaged in the political conjuncture. Building up to the general election, the campaign sought opportunities to call back to Blair’s government, which had passed a partial right to roam over 8% of England under the CRoW Act 2000, and saw a comprehensive right to roam passed across Scotland in 2003. Like those also found across Europe, such an act would codify a (once customary) right of access in law, and be accompanied by listed exceptions, modifications, and associated responsibilities. Drawing up an imagination of Scotland, the campaign not only discursively crossed the border, but did so literally. In 2023, the campaign organised the ‘Borderlands’ trespass on the Scottish Borders, where Wightman, a walker in Scotland, ceremoniously handed over a copy of the campaign’s draft bill to Shaikh, a trespasser in England, symbolising the lessons learned from the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 he helped pass — in part through his work as part of the Who Owns Scotland book and investigation. A Scottish-style right to roam could broaden the English land question as it had done across the border, but indeed, not beyond this imagination. The Trespass (Scotland) Act 1865, which also criminalises trespass with intent to reside, remains intact and is the most common statute subject to Scottish nomadic Gypsy-Travellers (Holligan 2014). Further demonstrating the importance of comparison across jurisdictions, the 1865 Act “was itself a direct response to the mass displacement of communities after the land enclosures of the Highland Clearances” (Burgum Jones Powell 2022 1222). Land access reform in Scotland has not led to reconciliation and repair for Gypsy, Traveller, and Romani communities, for whom a right to roam would enable the continuation of their customary practice and a right to culturally appropriate inhabitation. Back in England, this was made plain. In May 2024, the High Court declared that certain new provisions introduced by the Police Act 2022, which granted new enforcement powers to criminalise Gypsies and Travellers under ‘trespass’, are incompatible with the UK’s obligations 103 under the European Convention of Human Rights as given effect by the Human Rights Act 1998. Specifically, the Court ruled that these provisions unlawfully discriminated against Gypsies and Travellers and are incompatible with the right to private life (Article 14 ECHR read together with Article 8). As Marc Willers KC noted: This is a hugely significant judgment. In granting the declaration of incompatibility, the Court recognised that there is a lack of lawful stopping places for Gypsies and Travellers and that unless the government increases provision, the law as currently drafted will amount to unjustified race discrimination.” (Garden Court Chambers 2024) As part of the judgment, the court also acknowledged evidence for a “chilling effect” under the new provisions, referring to the tendency of police officers to threaten enforcement in order to encourage Gypsies and Travellers to just move on (R(Smith) v SSHD [2024] EWHC 1137). Such decisions as to what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate trespass are critical in revealing the nature of English property culture. The definition of trespass, proportionate to a right to roam, and indicative of Right to Roam’s answer to the English land question articulated in discursive and practical actions, can be further understood through its development of local groups. 3.5.2. Local While the national team has kept to around eight members, in 2022, the campaign began to develop infrastructure for the establishment of local groups across the country, as Jon explains: We set up the local groups partly because there was demand there, people wanting to get involved in their local area, and to help with the confidence of trespassing. It seemed like there was an appetite for these issues on the ground. It’s our role to facilitate that, but we’ve always been pretty open and flexible about what the local groups want to do with themselves. We give them autonomy, basically we have a set of core principles that we see as what the Right to Roam is. That’s broadly, we take a non-violent approach; we don’t damage property, stay on the civil side of the law and don’t stray into the criminal; we generally 104 have a peaceful and positive attitude, so we don’t encourage people to be angry and shout at landowners in confrontational situations, we encourage polite conduct and a positive vision of what being on the land is about. So we tend to have trespasses that are less about being protests against, and more about positive visions of experiencing ourselves as free on the land. (Interview with Jon Moses, 2023) To ensure local group trespasses remain a civil offence, the national campaign disseminates these core principles and a definition of trespass through ‘Know Your Rights While Trespassing’ workshops, held once a local group has been established. In public, the campaign consistently defines trespass as a civil offence, dispelling the widespread notion that ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’, proliferated through the performance of signs stating such. In doing so, it performs an authority over the inaccurate signs, aiming to lower the ‘psychological barrier’ to trespass. Without further specification, this public position excludes a definition of aggravated trespass, in which damage, disruption and distress — language derived from the Police Act 2022, which aims to criminalise roadside encampments — constitute criminal offence under trespass (Crown and Prosecution Service, 2024). This is important to clarify, as the discretionary power afforded by laws of trespass can potentially blur the lines between a civil and criminal offence. This is certainly the case for Gypsy, Traveller and Romani peoples, who are subject to the chilling effect — a particularly pernicious ‘psychological barrier’ — produced by laws of trespass, told to just move on regardless of whether they have actually committed a criminal offence (Travellers Times 2024). But by following the tenets of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, activities under the name of Right of Roam would be safe. Defining the scope of trespass, therefore Right to Roam’s activities and its answer to the land question, the workshops served a national aim: to recruit more people into civil trespass, arming them with the legal knowledge to seriously reduce the risk of arrest. Indeed, to date, there have been no arrests or prosecutions as a result of Right to Roam activities, a testament to Right to Roam’s Know Your Rights workshops and their distribution across the 105 country. This approach — in addition to the campaign’s foothold in the category of civil trespass — indicated the campaign’s divergence from environmental campaign Extinction Rebellion (XR), whose focus on mass arrest had alienated existing and potential participants. In 2019, campaign group Wretched of the Earth had published an open letter to XR, stating: The strategy of XR, with the primary tactic of being arrested, is a valid one – but it needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence. XR participants should be able to use their privilege to risk arrest, while at the same time highlighting the racialized nature of policing. (Wretched of the Earth 2019) Right to Roam had clearly learned something from XR, with Shaikh’s ‘walkshops’ for Black people and people of colour indicating the campaign’s potential to engage across racialised groups. But through the lens of Gypsy, Traveller and Romani communities experiencing racialised policing under trespass, Right to Roam’s inconsistent messaging around the scope of trespass presumes a specific audience, as the civil acts of trespass it has encouraged are not expected to fall under the scope of police authority. Participants in Know Your Rights workshops perform roleplays with landowners; they are not inducted into de-escalation tactics with police officers. Support for Gypsies, Travellers and Romani people who are routinely subject to racialised policing is, to my knowledge, not offered within the workshops or in other forms. In this particular sense, Right to Roam delineated the boundaries of what forms of political action it would take, and therefore what kind of ‘single issue’ campaign it would emerge as. The labour and geographic spread of local groups, including coordinating local trespasses to overcome the ‘psychological barrier’ to trespass, in turn supports the campaign’s communication and education work at a national scale. This is made explicit in The Trespassers’ Companion: The tactic of the mass trespass is necessarily rare; it takes far too much organising to become a regular, consistent event. […] Instead of a thousand people coming together on one site, why not have a hundred groups of ten people trespassing their own local area one 106 day, or have a consistent stream of trespasses, researched and collected together under one roof. Local newspapers are interested in local events and will be inclined to report on a trespass on an area of local importance. And if these trespasses are coordinated, then all of a sudden national press outlets will become more interested. This model allows the issue of greater public access to be expressed both in local and national terms, which is a perfect illustration of the dynamic at the heart of the Right to Roam campaign — we are for local access at a national level. (Hayes 2022 219, my emphasis) Local groups have organised a vast array of trespasses, from ‘wild’ swimming in reservoirs, raising awareness over water pollution, to wassailing, the customary ritual of singing in apple orchards to promoting good harvests. Campaign discourses have been developed into site-specific local trespasses, notably the concept of “micro-enclosures”, which Jon Moses has defined as “little enclosures”: gates, chains, security cameras, fences, and other performances of private property which prevent access to a space once accessible (@jm0ses tweet February 2 2023). The Cambridge group’s first trespass in March 2023 was on the Tetton Way, a right of way dating back to the 16th century now off-limits to the public. In September that year, the Bristol and Somerset & Wiltshire groups collaborated on a trespass, decorating the so-called ‘Iron Wall’ of Somerset, recently erected by millionaire landowner Alan Brunt over a footpath. “We brought holly, ferns, ivy, cotoneaster — we weaved these in the middle of the fence where other vegetation hadn’t overgrown yet,” the group said. “We also wrote notes to the landowner, well wishes and ways we’d like to connect to the landscape and enjoy it if they’d let us, we could help take care of it.” (@right_to_roam_bristol post December 19 2023). By making visible these ‘micro-enclosures’, the local groups contribute to a national demand for a comprehensive right to roam, and therefore to hold landowners accountable for extra-judicial, contemporary acts of enclosure; to belong. The powerful landowning lobby would continue to restrict the breadth of the English land question to the interests of the agricultural industry, performing as stewards of the countryside. In summer 2023, the Countryside Alliance had directly addressed the leadership of the Labour Party, at the 107 time acting as the Opposition, arguing that to adopt a right to roam would constitute an “attack on the countryside” (Horton 2023f). At the Conservative Party Conference, environment secretary Thérèse Coffey told the British Association for Shooting and Conservation: I’m frankly fed up with the Right to Roam campaign. The only things that have rights to roam are farmers, their pigs and cattle. (Smith 2023) Who belongs in the countryside is reflected in the scope of the land question itself, and indeed, in a narrow historical reading that erases commoners altogether. Coffey was using the right to roam pejoratively, but as discussed in Chapter III, Leonard Baker’s historical research shows that in the 19th century livestock were also criminalised under trespass, and in relation to commoners’ use: The sheep, cows, horses and geese who still grazed upon former common land held both economic and symbolic value to protesters and landlords during the nineteenth century. By roaming outside the neat definitions and demarcations constructed by enclosure, these animals challenged the incursion of private property into rural life. (Baker 2019) The continued contestation of these relations, and therefore what constitutes appropriate use, have been negotiated through performances of property over time. It is in the interests of the landowning lobby, to perform property as if this is not the case. But as Blomley (2013 25) illustrates: representations of the world do not have to be accurate so much as ‘felicitous’. Certain conceptions of property are dominant, on this view, because of their ability to enrol resources and arrange other representations. In so doing, they can help constitute a world in which they become true. The London local group responded directly to Coffey’s comments. On her birthday, the 17th of November 2023, they organised ‘Animals of the Land’, a mass trespass on the Arundel Estate.33 To counter Coffey’s performance of property relations, they asked attendees to dress up as a variety 33 Arundel is the seat of Edward Fitzalan-Howard, the 18th Duke of Norfolk, who is responsible for organising the state opening of Parliament. His combined estates amount to an estimated 46,000 acres, for which he received £449,166 in subsidies under the EU Common Agricultural Policy in 2015 (Cahill 2001; Who Owns England 2017; Who Owns Norfolk, undated) The pamphlet for this trespass details these figures, see Appendix 1. 108 of animals, and invited Leonard Baker to speak about his research. The trespass referenced national discourse and was a space for historical education. Based on Right to Roam’s contributions, including its exercise of broad-ranging discourses across national and local levels, it is possible to imagine a land justice movement capable of broadening the English land question. Through coordinated trespasses and social media communication, the campaign has cultivated enthusiasm and capacity for political education. Many local groups manage dedicated Instagram pages that interact with the national account — which currently has over 60,000 followers. However, the space for broader interventions in the English land question and the national team’s capacity to campaign on a broader basis may not hold, and as Jon indicates, suggests the need for further campaigns operating at the national level. In this sense, one could argue, this “single-issue” campaign is bloated by its initial discourses. But it is the discourses that have necessarily broadened the land question today. Local groups are developing wide-ranging interests in land justice, their labour and capacity directed towards recruitment and political education, creating spaces for engagement in the land question. While they engage in regular meetings with a member of the national team, they do not exercise a formal or direct role in influencing campaign strategy at the national level, nor in campaign publications. When it comes to local group interests, national political strategy takes precedent, as Jon indicates: there are moments where a local group might want to do something and we’re like oooh, that’s going to rub up against what we’re trying to do nationally. For instance, the Labour Party are particularly anxious about the farming lobby and the influence of farmers on the Right to Roam discourse and the pushback we’re getting from them. So at the moment that’s a key political battleground, at the same time the Tories are trying to turn right to Roam into a wedge issue,34 particularly amongst the farming community, turn it into a 34 A wedge issue is a cleavage that carries the risk of splitting an otherwise united group. In this instance, Jon is referring to the right to roam being a wedge issue for Labour voters, at a time where Labour was anticipated to win the general election with a large majority. 109 culture war to get back the rural votes they’ve been losing to Labour. (Interview with Jon Moses, 2023) This comment reveals an important constraint to the campaign. Those who have access to land through their exclusive ownership continue to set the terms of the English land question as a narrow field focused on agricultural use, rather than an expansive issue of inhabitation and belonging. A year on from our interview, Right to Roam demonstrated how it would broaden the English land question, using its national platform to intervene in public discourse as a new political moment took shape to the conjuncture. First, we need to understand how that national platform emerged. 3.5.3. Dartmoor In October 2022, a group of local residents camped on an area of Dartmoor National Park owned by financier Alexander Darwall. They were within their rights. Under the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 ‘concerning public access to commons’, the public shall have a right of access to the commons on foot and on horseback for the purpose of open-air recreation; and a person who enters on the commons for that purpose without breaking or damaging any wall, fence, hedge, gate or other thing, or who is on the commons for that purpose having so entered, shall not be treated as a trespasser on the commons or incur any other liability by reason only of so entering or being on the commons. (Dartmoor Commons Act 1985) Like the rest of England and Wales’ national parks, Dartmoor is a contested, complex and negotiated landscape of rights and responsibilities, with the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) and the Commoners’ Council managing local and landowner interests. Unlike the rest of England and Wales, it is considered the only place where the public can exercise a right to ‘wild’ camp under the broad definition of ‘open-air recreation’. As this right is presumed, exercised, performed, rather than explicitly written into law, it is customary. A few weeks after the campers practiced this custom, Darwall launched a case against the DNPA in the High Court, arguing 110 ‘open-air recreation’ “does not include a right of wild camping”. Under his logic, the public would not be “entitled … to pitch tents or otherwise occupy Stall Moor overnight … except with the claimant’s consent”, and wild camping would constitute trespass (Wall 2022). If his words were broadly accepted by the court, they would perform an act of enclosure. Epistemic enclosure, because in doing so they also perform simplifications of Dartmoor’s complex legal topography of Dartmoor, and without a strong memory culture of the commons in England, may do so felicitously. Darwall also claimed he did “not want to end wild camping” but demonstrate the “need for landowner permission to wild camp is a vital safeguard” for landowners (Wall 2022). However, Kevin Bishop, chief executive of the DNPA and responsible for asserting ongoing negotiations between users and owners in the park, defended the right: The Darwalls may claim they are not against wild camping but people would find it hard to contact and obtain the permission of landowners, who could well turn them down or even charge them for the privilege of staying overnight. The big risk is that this longstanding tradition, which we believe is enshrined as a right in the Dartmoor Commons Act, is lost for ever. (Wall 2022) Invoking the act of camping as a traditional practice, I argue Bishop demonstrated Darwall’s conflation of permissive access and a customary right was a continuation of the forms of elite redefinition that I discussed in the previous chapter, contributing to epistemic enclosure. This emergent contestation was, from the outset, coordinated by multiple actors involved in the politics of Dartmoor, a reflection of its complex land governance. Following months of coordination by the DNPA, and campaigning by The Stars Are For Everyone — a campaign focused on defending the right to wild camp on Dartmoor, co-founded by geographer Lewis Winks — in January 2023 the High Court ruled in favour of Darwall’s case. The chancellor of the High Court, Sir Julian Flaux, decided that section 10(1) of the Act, protecting forms of open air recreation, did not include 111 a right to wild camp, despite its continuous practice under the management of the Commoners’ Council, DNPA, and landowners. They had extinguished the right, but not the recent memory. The enclosure prompted a national response, marked first by a 3,500-strong rally on Stall Moor on Darwall’s 4,000-acre Blachford Estate. Taking place on January 21st, the rally was the largest land rights protest since the Winnats Pass rally of 1932, which brought almost 10,000 ramblers together weeks after the Kinder Scout mass trespass. The day sparked sustained national attention, with images of Old Crockern cited in newspaper coverage, and campaign discourses enrolled in political positions. For Right to Roam, Darwall had “demonstrated that the story of enclosures is one that is alive and active today.” (Right to Roam email to subscribers, 24 January 2023). Over the coming weeks, this story would begin to filter into national discourse. For Luke Pollard, the local Labour MP for Plymouth: The right to wild camp under the stars on Dartmoor is part of our ancient inheritance on Dartmoor. [...] If the courts can’t protect this right then parliament will need to reaffirm it and lock into law. Labour will extend the right to roam after the next election but the Conservatives could do it today if they wanted to. Let’s keep the pressure on. (Horton 2023c) Through the words of shadow environment secretary, Jim McMahon, now it was understood that the Labour Party backed an expanded right to roam. He argued for the continuation of initial access reforms — the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 — established under Blair’s first government. It’s not just about the right to pass through and explore. I think we do need to go beyond that, to look at the enjoyment aspect of it as well, which really hits at the heart of the Dartmoor case. The current right to roam gives people the right to pass through, but what about actually experiencing it, and to enjoy it? Our policy needs to give people more rights to do that. Ultimately if an appeal isn’t successful, it isn’t right that this right can be taken away by one landowner. So it’s parliament’s job to make sure it is enshrined in law. (Horton 2023b) 112 His pledge was important in two ways. First, it goes beyond partial recreational access to appeal to the same relational access Right to Roam had been forwarding. Second, it was conditional on a narrow condition, only to be initiated if the DNPA’s appeal of the High Court decision was unsuccessful. If successful, then, the customary right to wild camp would not be negotiated across other national parks, nor would a default of inclusion under a Right to Roam Act be instituted. On the 18th of May, Alex Sobel, Shadow Minister for Nature Recovery and the Domestic Environment, pledged a Scottish-style right to roam in the House of Commons: Labour’s approach, like in Scotland, will be that Labour’s right to roam will offer access to high-quality green and blue space in the rest of Britain. We will replace the default of exclusion with a default of access.35 Research shows that people with a stronger connection to nature were more likely to behave positively towards the environment. It’s quite simple: the more people engage with nature, the more likely they are to protect it. (Horton 2023f) The opposition party had reiterated Right to Roam’s relational access approach, demonstrating potential to move beyond a liberal recreational access framework into notions of belonging. As the appeal continued to gain national attention, so did the mounting critiques from the agricultural lobby and Conservative Party. Both performed private property, attempting to maintain an exclusive capacity to narrowly define the English land question. In July, two months after Sobel’s speech-act, Darwall’s lawyers argued “open-air recreation” confers the right to “wander around” including “straying from footpaths”, but not to camp, as “sleeping overnight on the commons is not recreation, open-air or otherwise, because you are just asleep”. The fine details of the case thus rested on negotiating the definition of recreation versus inhabitation, just as legislators narrowed 35 In my interview with Jon, he told me: “That’s literally a line from one of our briefing papers, so we were like, great, at least someone was reading!” 113 the definition of ‘unauthorised encampment’ in developing the Police Act 2022. Hearing the appeal, Sir Jeffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, posited: You don’t necessarily enjoy anything whilst you sleep, you camp to keep yourself alive, but the recreation is the walking. Camping is not in the open air as you pitch a tent, and secondly you are not really recreating, you are just maintaining your human capabilities. (Horton 2023d) But by the end of July, he had moved to overturn the High Court ruling, deciding: In my judgment, on its true construction, section 10 (1) of the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 confers on members of the public the right to rest or sleep on the Dartmoor commons, whether by day or night and whether in a tent or otherwise. (Horton 2023e) In doing so, he disregarded the difference between sleeping in a tent or on tarp, in the open air, as the boundary of a tent itself had been enrolled in defining ‘open-air recreation’. The overarching argument of Right to Roam is that customary access — rather than piecemeal permissions — enables the ability to be relation to nature. To close supporters, it cut to the heart of Right to Roam’s argument for relational access; to whoever invested in liberation for Gypsies, Travellers and Romani people, it had delineated what kind of encampment it would campaign for; to the national stage, this case demonstrated the need for a comprehensive right to roam. All of which, of course, falls under the scope of an increasingly broad English land question. In his final attempt to enclose the right to wild camp on Dartmoor, Darwall appealed the Court of Appeal ruling in the Supreme Court, so by the time the general election rolled around, no final decision had been made. Labour’s manifesto made no reference to right to roam, instead pledging to create “nine new National River Walks, one in each region of England, and establish three new National Forests in England” as part of its “plans to improve responsible access to nature” (Labour Party manifesto, 2024 59). In one sense, this was a setback to the broadening of the English land question, of which Right to Roam hoped a Scottish-style right to roam would be a first step. In another, the ongoing legal contestation over Dartmoor is also Right to Roam’s 114 biggest political win yet. As planning geographer Shepherd describes in an article about land value capture, “Mr Darwall’s recent strategic misstep” has broadened the English land question, formerly “filtered through the lens of the housing crisis and housebuilding […] towards the wider issues and inequalities of landownership and access to land.” Whatever the outcome, he argues, “the process of fighting the case will attract further media and political attention and will maintain mainstream political pressure on land justice issues.” (Shepherd 2023 96) In collaboration with The Stars Are For Everyone, Right to Roam has used the ongoing legal contestation to sustain a hyper-local enclosure into a national platform. Dartmoor and the right to wild camp danced across the nation’s tongue. Unlike piecemeal and parliamentary enclosures of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, this one had received significant and distinguished national attention, bolstered by a new and emergent campaign savvy with the British media. More recently, the ability of landowners to enrol in property law, to enact elite redefinition, was further tested. In October 2024, Darwall’s lawyer Timothy Morshead KC told the Supreme Court judge, Lord Stephens, that picnicking on Dartmoor constituted trespass; defining open-air recreation exclusively as being on foot or horseback: Morshead: Once you’ve started your picnic, you are no longer relying on your right, you are relying on a more informal practice. Stephens: You’d still be a trespasser and someone could sue you? (Horton 2024b) Darwall’s legal team argued this was the case. If accepted, an outcome that, at the time of writing, we are still waiting on, their actions would constitute an act of enclosure. But Morshead’s specific comment could also constitute a speech-act. In denying that informal, customary practices can be protected as rights through their enactment, Darwall has sought — like many elite landowners before him — to obfuscate heterogenous property relations, a form of epistemic enclosure. 115 Building on the platform it developed through the Dartmoor case, Right to Roam’s national interventions in the political juncture would challenge such forms of elite redefinition. In Labour’s first Autumn Budget under Keir Starmer, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced unprecedented reforms to agricultural property relief (APR). From April 2026, it said, inherited agricultural assets worth over £1m would be subject to a 20% tax upon the death of their owner, half the usual rate of inheritance tax. While the Treasury claimed less than 500 farms a year would be subject to the changes, the NFU and Country Land and Business Association claimed 70,000 people would be affected, with wide-ranging impacts on national food security. As I have already discussed, NFU President Tom Bradshaw called these measures a “stab in the back” (Partridge, Horton and Elgot 2024). With APR flooding the news cycle and farmers set to protest in Westminster, Right to Roam chose to intervene in the national discussion. The day before the protest, Jon Moses publicly responded to Bradshaw’s comments on the right to roam, made a month prior: Last month we discovered the real reason the Labour Party suddenly pulled their commitments to expanding the right to roam: the NFU were working behind the scenes to block the proposals. I bring this to public attention now because the NFU is currently embroiled in a dispute about the bespoke tax breaks its industry receives, for which it presumably would like the sympathy and support of the public. So I think it should be public knowledge that the organisation now bears prime responsibility for millions of people in England being unable to access nature on their doorsteps; unable to enjoy rights to paddle or swim; unable to enjoy rights to cycle, or camp, even on the access land that already exists. (@jon.moses and @right.2roam Instagram post, November 18 2024) In an attempt to reverse the wedge issue and enrol in public support for access, Moses argues the landowning lobby are indifferent and even hostile to public access. Despite this, he calls for greater engagement with farmers on “issues like livestock worrying, conservation efforts and public education”; for “transparency” and “public debate about access reform” rather than “backroom scheming”. Drawing on his personal relationships with neighbouring farmers, the campaign once 116 again seeks to broaden the land question through its vision of relational access, deemed to benefit all through increased “public support and commercial vision”. (Right to Roam Instagram post, November 18 2024) Although members of the national campaign have repeatedly intervened in contemporary agricultural discourse on their personal social media accounts, and as part of the Access Family Farmer Network, this particular instance marks Right to Roam’s first national intervention in this arena as a campaign. It used the political moment around APR to platform the need for access reform more expansively. In doing so, it performs the politics of the countryside as a broader politics of land, therefore enabling transparency by those who do not own land and accountability for those who do. The same strategy was not applied to the landmark High Court decision on the Police Act 2022, which is still in effect, a law of trespass that through the language of ‘unauthorised encampment’ continues to discipline nomadic land use within broader systemic attempts to settle Gypsies, Travellers and Romani communities. The campaign’s lobbying for a Right to Roam Act at the national scale has been entangled with the Dartmoor case, demonstrating the power of local attachments to make visible enclosure as a piecemeal commodification of land, and the ability of Right to Roam to intervene in the current conjuncture. Given how easy it has been for Darwall to engage in epistemic enclosure by undermining the continuity of customary practices, I argue it is still not clear to the wider public just how broad the English land question can be, and so, contextualising this in its decline remains vital. As England moves forward into a new juncture with a new government, I show how a multiscalar approach is therefore critical. 117 3.5.3. All the world’s a stage The Right to Roam Act, Jon explains, is “all about creating the preconditions for what we want to achieve”: [O]ur technical legal name is not Right to Roam, it’s Wyld Service CIC, so that’s what the vision for all this is. We will transition to using the new access laws to propagate a new culture of connection and care across the countryside, and that’s taking people on this journey that’s now more available to them: from connection, to protection, to ecological restoration. [...] There’s a kind of organisational philosophy at play here as well, which is that we don’t want to become a legacy organisation. We think that one of the traps that a lot of NGOs and campaign organisations get into is that they keep existing when their remit or purpose has lapsed, and they just become these machines of self-perpetuation. When Right to Roam needs to die, Right to Roam will die. Wild Service will hopefully be the phoenix that arises from its ashes. (Interview with Jon Moses, 2023) Despite the general hostility to a Right to Roam Act within the Conservative Party leadership, and broader institutional constraints, the campaign moved forward to enact its vision for relational access — the ‘New English Countryside’ it had envisioned from the beginning. The launch was marked with the publication of a book; a book club led by the contributors/campaigners; and a three-day event on the banks of the River Roding in London. An example of ‘Wild Service in action’, the weekend saw participants remove waste from the river, plant trees, improve pathways, and participate in a writing workshop led by the Right to Roam’s ‘poet-in-residence’ Daniel Grimston. The neglected river transformed into more of a nature reserve through an admirable amount of grift, as I witnessed. The combination of direct action and cultural ritual, first developed through the Right to Roam campaign’s relational access approach, was now more explicitly directed towards nature restoration, as Paul Powlesland, founder of the River Roding Trust, told The Guardian: We know that people are disconnected from nature and we know that the restoration of nature is the work of this century. So we must put them together. [...] If regarding nature as sacred happens in the UK, it’s not going to come from the politicians saying, ‘Oh, we now believe in this’; it’s going to come from a grassroots movement of people who are 118 connected with a specific local nature, who then demand rights for nature on a national level. (Barkham 2024) In his contribution to the book, Hayes argues Right to Roam has “drawn attention to the historical injustice of enclosure”, “[igniting] an urgent conversation, one long suppressed by English orthodoxy, of the relationship between our communities and the land.” (Hayes 2024 viii) The initial discourses proliferated by Right to Roam through acts of trespass are understood as the foundation for this new movement, with the public’s disconnection from land remaining the focus of an ongoing project for relational access: We must rebuild this culture that came intuitively to our ancestors, both in this land and others, because they were born into it, they were raised with it and they passed on their experience before they died. The truth, though, is that we will almost be starting from scratch. The chasm between our lived experience of nature and our present state spans many generations. Children do not learn to differentiate birdsong because their mothers didn’t, because their grandmothers didn’t. So we must look to other cultures for guidance. Each and every one of the essays that follows has drawn from the knowledge of indigenous philosophies from around the world. Many of these cultures have, despite the many attempts at suppression, kept the threads alive between their present selves and the old ways. If we listen to them, perhaps we, too, can begin to patch up our old tapestry, mend, and reweave the broken strands. (Hayes 2024 xi) Through the lens of epistemic enclosure, this argument speaks to the specific loss of customary memory within England as a causal factor for alienation, understood as disconnection from nature, and therefore a major barrier to climate and ecological action. It positions Wild Service as an extension of Right to Roam’s discursive and political interventions towards relational access, and therefore is of interest to this study. The continual challenge to dominant English property culture is still understood as central. But in this transition to a broader vision, the team also makes a distinct move to look beyond its continual comparison to Scotland, drawing more frequent and explicit comparisons between England and other contexts of dispossession as a way to patch up England’s fractured property — thus memory — culture, as Hayes explains: 119 If you take away the notion of property as we’ve defined it in western law, how do you enact belonging in Indigenous cultures? From New Zealand to North America to Australia to India, it’s through culture. Culture comes from the land. When communities come together on the land, you celebrate. [...] Undoubtedly there will be repercussions because people don’t have a generational relationship with the Earth. And that will come. But [opponents] will try and pin that on [the] right to roam when the source is people’s exclusion in the first place — landowners’ barbed wire fences. (Barkham 2024) This “search for what a multicultural indigenous British identity could be” runs throughout the book (Lee 2024 201). For instance, Paul Powlesland draws on Māori disputes with the British Crown over conceptions of ownership over the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (or so-called New Zealand), arguing this process of reconciliation “demonstrates that it is perfectly possible for a river in an economically developed country, over which there are numerous competing rights and interests, to move from a model of ownership and dominion to one of guardianship and care. Crucially, these changes have happened in a common law legal system that is very similar to the UK.” (Powlesland in Hayes and Moses 2024 70) Powlesland does not go on to discuss the ongoing colonial relationship responsible for this similarity, not only retaining the colonial concept of development, but the distance between England and Aotearoa, two contexts forever entangled by British colonialism. In other contributions, the British Empire is explicitly discussed, with Harry Jenkinson taking the most critical approach to indigeneity in the book. He argues it is “important here not to homogenise or romanticise indigenous peoples”, but instead, “through amplifying indigenous voices and learning from their kinship practices, we can respectfully share in a depth of ecological knowledge and reaffirm connections with our non-human kin” (Jenkinson in Hayes and Moses 2024 84). Further, his positions could be said to anticipate nationalist critiques, instead focusing on the possibility of being in relation to land: So can we ever have a true connection to this land without being indigenous to it? Of course! Whoever you are and wherever you’re from, connection is honed through relationship, not birthright; it is cultivated through non-exclusive practices of care. 120 [N]o matter how buried under centuries of feudal, capitalist and industrial disconnection from nature, we all still have seeds of living within us, waiting to sprout forth. (Jenkinson in Hayes and Moses 2024 89) And this needs to be extended globally, not through coloniality but through solidarity; respecting the rights of every community and valuing their care over every green space. (Jenkinson in Hayes and Moses 2024 94) The politics of memory, as usual, is a key ground of negotiation for what these forms of connection are. But Wild Service also appears as a call for internationalism beyond Scotland. After invoking multiple alternative land relations under the umbrella of ‘indigeneity’, Moses closes the book reflecting the concept of accountability through relation, responding to the increasingly mainstream framing of a “right to responsible access” that Labour would soon cite in its manifesto. Wild Service is a more radical belief than that: it is about the right to be responsible, the right to connect and care. Responsibility derives from response, to be answerable. It is a pledge we make to a relationship with which we are already in a relationship. [...] [It is] a form of participatory belonging which has nothing to do with the arbitrary demarcations of the nation state. But if Wild Service doesn’t need England, it feels like England needs Wild Service. Of all the nations on the isle, it suffers most from its vexed relationship with identity. Its imperial history, first subsuming the other countries of the not-so-United Kingdom, before assuming the moniker ‘Great Britain’ to do the same elsewhere, has left England with a void at its centre: a worrisome sense of what might be left once the pomp of monarchy and the imperial past are peeled away. (Moses 2024b 263-265) The English land question is thus understood through processes of dispossession enacted in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and further afield through the British Empire. This lucid characterisation is critical. It demonstrates campaign’s understanding that property relations in England have been and are performed through its relationships to other contexts wherein it has enacted modes of dispossession. Asking what a “new set of common rights might look different today”, Moses suggests how the practices and policies, some already outlined within the book, would include: Rights of care and healing, the right to belong. Others stretch our concept of what is ‘common’ altogether, incorporating the rights of nature itself. In places, such meta-rights might be encompassed through more targeted legislation (such as the right to roam, which our campaign has focused on). Or it would redress historic injustices, restoring rights to 121 reside for sustainable or nomadic ways of life, and speak to new means to correct them, such as the community right to buy. (Moses 2024b 267-8) Positioning Wild Service as an even broader discursive intervention than a Right to Roam, and this philosophy becomes a vehicle for boldly reimagining the politics of land in England, in the face of institutional constraints. However, it does beg the question as to what responsibilities are denoted by relational access, whether under the campaign banner of Right to Roam or the intimately associated concept of Wild Service. Where are the boundaries drawn? To whom, and where, are we responsible? In August, the concept of Wild Service was enrolled across existing collaborations. In a weekend held in Leicestershire, River Action, Trash Free Trails, Wild Card, the River Roding Trust, Lawyers for Nature, and the Access Friendly Farmers and Landowners Network attended and facilitated a series of workshops around the Wild Service theme. This grounded their future direction in embodied practices of guardianship, using clean-ups, pollution monitoring, and relational engagement with farmers to contest landowner claims to stewardship. Despite Jon’s conclusion, though, the event did not include nomadic communities practicing customary land relations in England. In one sense, the Right to Roam campaign had already begun stoking a critical mass of broad-based support for an English land question understood in relation to, and solidarity with, ongoing land justice struggles in contexts of dispossession shaped by British coloniality. In the local groups, a larger membership was, as could be expected, engaging with the English land question as informed by the campaign’s broader discourses. Many recruited into the campaign had first read The Book of Trespass, where Hayes uses Israel’s Iron Dome as an example of how property is performed across contexts: 122 From the nineteenth-century flint wall in front of me to the Israeli West Bank barrier, whose 440-mile-long, eight-metre-high extent combines concrete, razor wire, steel fencing, ditches, tank patrol lanes, an ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile air protection, a subterranean extension to block tunnelling attempts plus constant military monitoring from guards, snipers and drones, walls are all the same. (Hayes 2020 95) Over the past two years in particular, the conjuncture has been shaped by moments of political change, or junctures. The ongoing settler colonial genocide of Palestinians has reached a brutal apex in the months since October 2023, a moment ripe for internationalist land justice, of which a history of the English enclosure movement should be included. However, neither Right to Roam — nor its co-constitutive Wild Service — have used its national platform to speak out in solidarity with those indigenous to Palestine subject to Israeli occupation and legal infrastructure established under the British Mandate, as discussed in the previous chapter. However, that members of the national campaign have expressed solidarity on an individual basis, and local groups have used their spaces to coordinate participation in and collaborations with rallies in solidarity with Palestine, is an indicator that Right to Roam has facilitated spaces to engage with the English land question. The tension between these broader interests and the campaign’s strategic identity as a “single issue” campaign persists in light of these more contentious cases of land injustice, which are explicit about the role of racial regimes of ownership in England (Bhandar 2018). Palestinian indigeneity, or Gypsy, Traveller, and Romani customary practices across Britain therefore indicate the scope of Right to Roam’s answer to the English land question in practice. It has not enrolled its broad discursive contributions to intervene more broadly in what is a new juncture for land justice, with a significant national platform. Given its single issue focus, to speak out would be a risk; on the other hand, to speak out would be an opportunity for deeper political education at the national level, strengthening capacities to address forms of epistemic enclosure that inhibit the scope of land reform, including relational access. Despite these choices, 123 indeed because of these choices, Right to Roam has revealed where the English land question must be broadened. Its performances of property relations prove a coordinated and well-resourced land justice movement should be heterogeneous, relational, visible and influential, with “widely distributed support, socially and geographically” (Christophers 2018 325-7). Christophers’ concern with a lack of countermovement, with all its constituent features, therefore remains an important litmus test for understanding the breadth of the land question in England. This is because he raises the issue of scale, arguing that a counter-movement to enclosure would need to be national in scope. I would add that such a movement even in England should be internationalist in scope, as enclosure is a continuous process constituted by broader, global processes of dispossession, any major contributor to a land justice movement in England requires not only a dedicated focus on England, but on Britain, on the British Empire, and globalised circuits of accumulation by dispossession. Through forms of dispossession — whether enclosure or colonial dispossession — English property culture as we know it has extended across the world, disciplining and obfuscating a heterogeneity of land relations. As Hall and Massey urge, to effectively intervene, we must first “analyse ruthlessly what sort of crisis it is.” (2010 58) It is not possible to constrain the English land question into one scale, whether individual, local, national, or international. The responsibility to act in solidarity, not coloniality, with those dispossessed everywhere, must inhere throughout a land justice movement in England. Miknaf Ha’aretz, a collective of Jewish radicals and diaspora organising for land justice, is one notable indicator that such a movement is possible. Opening the ‘Land Justice Sessions’ in February 2024, they acknowledged the ongoing violence in Gaza, and invited Nadia Shaikh to speak on behalf of the Right to Roam campaign. In her talk, she discussed the impact of enclosure 124 on contemporary diaspora living in England and Wales, drawing a link between their alienation from culture and land relations after settlement, and the process of dispossession: We do live in a country where the colonial practices of excluding people from land — I mean, this is the genius of it, right? — given that land, as I was saying with my relationship with it, gives me a sense of belonging and confidence and place. If you want to destroy any kind of sense of community or soul, you push people off the land and don't give them access to it. But particularly, you know, the diaspora that we have in the country right now, so much of that is linked to that same colonial ideology that pushed people off the land in the first place. So there is a deep grief and there is a deep pain coming from all of the world to land here, to be taken away from your land and then to a land where you can't access the land. And then you can't even learn the birdsong to give you and relearn that sense of belonging. The right to roam seems, on the surface of it, just a simple thing, maybe we could go walk more places. But for me, it's a really crucial piece of this, the stuff that we've got to chip away at. In this discussion, Shaikh points to the importance of relational access in deconstructing the ways in which forms of dispossession — whether in settler colonial projects or in the specific context of England — impact all who reside in England today, subject to a persistent property ideology shaped by a weak memory culture. Therefore, she suggests, we can learn from those who experience grief in their relationships to land in England, having arrived from a different context of dispossession. The campaign continues to defy neat categorisation as a recreational campaign by asking broader questions about the moral, cultural, and political economy of land. As a relational access campaign, they call attention to issues of belonging and nature connection with a critique of the liberal recreational framework. In doing so, they enrol on broader aspects of the land question, expanding and contracting their status as a “single issue campaign” in pursuit of both broad political recruitment at the local and pragmatic political strategy at the national level. The Right to Roam Act is yet to come, if it ever does. In engaging with Right to Roam, a necessarily broader answer to the land question is clear. However, Right to Roam’s contributions are also broader than this single ask and could be even broader (even if as a base for action by other 125 campaigners). Through their political interventions, campaign work and scholarship, they have sought to increase public understanding of the politics of land, and therefore the scope for land reform, in the current conjuncture. Not even five years in, this is a significant achievement that is difficult to overstate, and it is with the loss of the land question that their contributions must continue to be evaluated. It is with this in mind that I turn to the scale of the “mindwall”, that which acts as a psychological barrier to belonging, the decommodification of land relations, and a challenge to English property culture. Through these situated acts, property is understood as performed, enabling accountability of landowners in the past, present and future: an intervention in epistemic enclosure. 126 Chapter 4: Tracing terra incognita through trespass So I eagerly wanderd on & rambled along the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers seemd to forget me & I imagind they were the inhabitants of new countrys the very sun seemd to be a new one & shining in a different quarter of the sky…36 — John Clare, Autobiography What the eye cannot see, the heart cannot grieve.37 — Maria Fernandez Garcia, Restore Nature Now rally, September 2023 Looking at the Who Owns England map, what I know of the Badminton Estate, in South Gloucestershire, is grey. Like many aristocratic landholdings, it is not possible to map its boundaries from public data. We do know that it is owned by the current and 12th Duke of Beaufort, Henry Somerset, but the extent of his broader estates, of which he is the beneficial owner, can currently only be estimated.38 In 2001, Cahill estimated 52,000 acres, up from 51,085 from the Return of Owners of Land taken in 1873 (Cahill 2001).39 36 This quote can be found in Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972 120). 37 (@right.2roam Instagram post, September 30 2023) 38 Both surnames give clues as to the general region of his Estate. Beaufort is a small village in Blaenau Gwent, South Wales, about an hour’s drive from Cardiff Bay which overlooks the Severn Estuary. The School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University lists “Duke of Beaufort Estate” as one of the estuary’s “particularly important” landowners of the estuary (Severn Estuary Partnership 2010 62). Around 55% of the foreshore and seabed (up to 12 nautical miles from the shore) is owned by the Crown Estate, with statutory and port authorities, church commissioners, the Beaulieu and Beaufort Estates, Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall and government agencies owning the other 45% (Country Life 2010). 39 A profile of the current Duchess of Beaufort (née Georgia Powell) in Vogue states the Duke’s “land exceeds 50,000 acres”, with no clear attribution. “I’m busier than I used to be,” the Duke answers to journalist Plum Sykes (Sykes 2019). This is perhaps the closest we have to confirmation that the estate has increased in size since the 1873 Return, although the growth of commercial activities is most likely responsible. On a secondary note, Sykes’ great-grandfather co-authored the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire into territories under British and French rule, contributing to the reterritorialisation of the ‘Middle East’ (Khalidi 2016). 127 Through acts of trespass, my field of vision has extended to those just three miles north of Badminton House, the Duke’s primary residence. Where I walked, there was no signage explaining the history of the land, as is often the case on estates owned by the National Trust. But the Badminton Estate does offer up a polished website with a short family history, beginning with the purchase of Great and Little Badminton manors in 1612. Today, it reads, The current Duke and Duchess of Beaufort continue to improve and invest in the Estate and are passionate about preserving its assets for the long term. Whilst Badminton House remains primarily a private family home, it offers a variety of wonderful venues for weddings, private parties or corporate events. Through this description, his estates office performs this land as a place of exclusive belonging; as privately owned for private use; its land available for hire and therefore commodified. Over the course of three walks, ‘trespasses’ I discuss in this chapter, I have experienced how the land takes on multiple meanings; new life of its own. Despite its enclosure and commodification, a part of me now belongs there. Terra incognita, Latin for ‘unknown land’, is a term used by cartographers to refer to spaces unmapped and undocumented. Colloquially, it refers to knowledge not yet learned, whether in domains unfamiliar to the individual, or gaps in research to be filled within epistemic communities. When considering our cognitive maps — our embodied systems of navigation — these meanings overlap. Terra incognita is not empty space, but space off our cognitive maps entirely. Like a secret garden with a door concealed by ivy, its very existence is unknown to us, let alone the way it is used by others. To reveal terra incognita, the boundary must be seen and crossed. ‘Terra incognita’ can be traced to the first geographical text, Ptolemy’s Geographia, but in the 15th century was revived by European cartographers complicit in the colonisation of the Americas, denoting lands to be explored. The colonial mapping of terra incognita was a precursory 128 performance to the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, which denied the fact of inhabitation and land use by Indigenous peoples, an essential component of estaregimes of ownership (Bhandar 2018). Soon after, place names replaced ‘terra incognita’ to assert colonial possession (Monmonier 1996). As an extension of its use in colonial cartography and as a metaphor for knowledge not yet acquired, I understand terra incognita as both the grey on the map of land ownership — the boundaries not yet documented by state land registration infrastructure — and, prior to trespass, the enclosed spaces not yet experienced by those excluded; the evidence of enclosure not yet witnessed. It is that which lies beyond the wall, itself a barrier that is performed to obfuscate its disciplining, exclusionary, and ultimately amnesic force: what I understand as epistemic enclosure. As enclosure is piecemeal, to reveal terra incognita requires multiple acts of boundary crossing — trespass — at the local scale. Trespass is performed by the body, embodied, as Nick Hayes indicates with “mindwall”, a concept used to describe the “psychological barrier” to trespass.40 Through these embodied and intentional acts, we can learn to see the land and its epistemic enclosure as a result of elite redefinition of social space, constituted by deliberate, cumulative, habitual acts that perform private property; felicitous because they disparage other property relations. Using the critical cartographic method of mental sketch mapping, I show how intentional acts of trespass intervene in epistemic enclosure. 40 It appears Hayes develops this phrase from the German concept of Mauer im Kopf, a “wall in the head”, disseminated in popular discourse after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Hayes writes: “Without the actual presence of the wall, it was still perceived by the residents of Berlin; like a phantom limb, it continued to trigger the brain. A study published in 2005 found that Germans repeatedly overestimated the distance between cities that had been in opposite halves of their once divided country, while those who opposed the reunification exaggerated the distances even further. The wall had gone yet, to this day, its gulf persists.” (Hayes 2020 97; Carbon and Leder 2005) This mindwall, I would argue, reflects Berlin’s specific memory culture as well as the spatial perceptions of Berliners. 129 In this final substantive chapter, I consider the land question at the scale of individual property relations. Drawing from my observations as a participant, I demonstrate the epistemic effect of trespass. Through embodied and repetitive acts, landowners can be held accountable, one’s “mindwall” can be confronted, and a heterogeneity of property relations can be performed. Tacit or folk knowledge can be produced in spite of exclusive and disciplinary performances of private property. I also demonstrate how mental sketch mapping is a critical cartographic practice whose form is particularly appropriate for representing the performativity of property. Developed out of post-representational cartography, it is processual, partial, and itself performative, enabling participants to attend to their cognitive map and cultivate spatial memory. By bridging literatures on post-representational cartography and the performativity of property, I show how property relations are produced and reiterated through tacit knowledge and spatial memory. Intentional acts of trespass are capable of decommodifying land relations, revealing the piecemeal and performative nature of enclosure. The chapter is a chronological account of how I co-organised a mapping-themed trespass and facilitated a mental sketch mapping exercise, and concludes with my empirical findings. It begins with the first mass trespass I participated in on the Badminton Estate; a Know Your Rights While Trespassing workshop (where I introduce the mental sketch mapping method); two ‘reconnaissance’ trespasses; and the mapping trespass itself. Following these ethnographic accounts, I analyse five mental sketch maps produced during the trespass, in tandem with interviews conducted with participants. The organised trespasses described are spaces to discuss issues of ownership, access, use and rights. Through the mental sketch mapping method, it is possible to see how these conversations act as landmarks across highly differentiated but ultimately shared experiences of the same trespass, reflecting the scale of the trespass and the specific 130 performance of property relations within the context of the day. Through peer-to-peer comparison, in both the on-day exercise and subsequent interviews, individuals enrol in a collective memory of trespass, developing positive attachments and relationships to enclosed land. Particularly notable is my finding that the so-called ‘moment of trespass’ is unclear to individuals, reflecting both the site-specific context and broader educational purpose of the trespass. Individuals discuss why they choose to trespass, citing Right to Roam’s relational approach as well as broader discourses in the land question. The interviews I conducted reveal how Right to Roam’s answer to the English land question operates at the scale of the national, local and individual body, inviting members of the public to interrogate their ‘psychological barrier’ to trespass. Tracing terra incognita through trespass reveals the breadth and decline of the English land question; of our relationships to enclosed land in England. This work has been facilitated by Right to Roam, but in trespass and mental sketch mapping alike, I find there is potential for further use in political education. 4.1. Botany Unbound On the last day of July 2022, I made it to my first mass trespass. As the “start of a whole series of education themed trespasses”, Jon Moses said, we spent the day learning common uses of local plants (@jm0ses tweet August 4 2022). The only cost to my friends and I was a meal deal and our bus fare down from London to Bristol, where we met our fellow trespassers by the harbour which receives the River Avon. On these waters, thousands of tonnes of tobacco were shipped, processed, and distributed, binding the city’s form to the British-funded plantation economy in the American South. Looking down at the surface, I recalled the Colston Four, who — during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 — had toppled a statue of one of Britain’s wealthiest slave traders below 131 the surface. Earlier, in January 2022, they had been acquitted by a jury in a landmark trial which aimed to balance the proportionality of their right to protest while recognising the protections afforded by private property rights. The decision was an exception to the rule, in a juncture marked by increasing attempts to criminalise protest under laws of trespass. As we boarded our second bus of the day, community support police officers asked where we were going. They had clearly caught wind of the event, but we knew nothing more than what had been shared on Right to Roam’s Instagram account: the trespass would be taking place “at an undisclosed location” (@right.2roam Instagram post July 30 2022). As we set off down the winding roads of the Westcountry, I caught myself looking for them trailing behind us, but as we arrived in the village of Didmarton, not one police officer was in sight. Jon led us off the bus into a small clearing overlooking rolling fields. Standing by a cameraman filming a documentary, he introduced the day, and informed us of our rights and responsibilities. He briefly discussed laws around trespass and foraging, our primary activities for the day.41 Rather than ‘leave no trace’ of litter, he advised we leave a “positive trace”: to cultivate a sense of belonging to the land. He also explained that he was responsible for managing any confrontation with landowners, should we be challenged upon entry into the inner sanctum of the estate. While this introduction put me at ease, I carried with me a sense of being observed by the documentarian and at odds with the public footpath sign right beside us. I’d spent a year reading about mass trespasses and mapping trespass 41 Under the Theft Act 1968, it is legal to pick any wild plant on any land for personal consumption, including fruit, flowers, fungi and foliage, barring endangered species and cultivated crops. This means that even if you are caught foraging while trespassing, the landowner is not legally able to confiscate legally foraged goods. This is the same under Scottish law, except in England and Wales you must follow a direction to leave if requested under laws of trespass. In England and Wales, rights of way also include the customary right to forage. However, under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, applicable to England and Wales, the partial right to roam does not include a right to forage, as this is not considered recreational, and indeed specifically implicates the right to roam if the user “intentionally removes, damages or destroys any plant, shrub, tree or root or any part of a plant, shrub, tree or root.” (Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000) As a result, the right to forage in England and Wales remains piecemeal, with the limited right to roam excluding the right to forage, unlike in Scotland. This legal complexity, and disconnection from our rights, is another result of epistemic enclosure. 132 signs in so-called Vancouver.42 Here, finally, I was in a crowd of four dozen others, trying to place my feelings about the day and exactly where the trespass would begin. As Jon introduced us to four botanists who would be sharing their knowledge, my trepidation subsided. I was here to learn, and as excited as a child on the morning of a school trip. On the bus, we’d each been handed a pamphlet providing a broad sweep of Badminton’s history, explaining the purpose of the trespass, and including examples of “healing plants to look out for.” (Appendix 2) I’d been drawn to pineapple weed, marked as “soothing for the nervous system” and to be “found growing in compacted soil (nearby gates and pathways)” (Appendix 2). As we set out on the footpath, I tried to spot one based on the black and white diagram. Unsuccessful, I leant into a conversation with my friend about the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS), set to replace the system of agricultural subsidies under the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy. I quickly googled: in 2015, the Duke of Beaufort received £688,097 from the European taxpayer (Shrubsole 2017). Through hayfever-induced tears, she explained how the field margins, now abundant with tall grasses and summer wildflowers, marked the beginning of a new era for the English countryside. Maria Fernandez Garcia, our first guide, gave us our first lesson of the day. She unsettled the myth of the dock leaf, which since a child I had believed soothed nettle stings. “Plantain,” she said, picking a long, ribbed leaf from the ground. “This will soothe your stings.” We learned the plant contains a naturally occurring antihistamine, and could also be used for bites, irritated skin, and to relieve sore feet. “It is also known as ‘white man’s footsteps,’” she said, having followed colonisers around the world and developed into 270 varieties. “What can a dock leaf be used for?” I asked Maria. While Anglo-Saxons used its seeds, also known as psyllium husk, to make whey 42 My ongoing mapping project explores signs as performances of property, and can be accessed at @trespassigns on Instagram. 133 bread, its presence also indicates compacted soil, breaking up gravel as well as human gallstones. Images of pasts and places beyond the field entered my vision, and I projected my imagination of commoners in the distant corner. She then handed me what looked like a daisy without white petals. Maria’s act of picking cast into my mind an aggregate image, compiling the seemingly infinite times I had seen the plant beneath my feet, but only as a weed. She told us to crush its yellow head between our fingers, and then suggested we could eat it, if we wanted. It would help us remember it in future. “Pineapple,” I exhaled — and tasted. How could this grow here, in England? I turned to my friend. “I used to see these everywhere, but I never noticed them in this way.” “I bet you could train your eye to see them,” she smirked. “Yeah, like trespass signs.” This is “people’s knowledge”, Maria told the group. “We have evolved alongside these plants. Pineapple weed likes being trodden on.” As human feet work to pollinate them, they are often found in walkways and cities. When brewed with plantain, a partner plant, it acts as a broader antihistamine, relieving hayfever. I looked at my friend. Having forgotten to bring her medication, her eyes were growing more and more red. What else didn’t I know? Reviewing the pamphlet, Maria had written that as we lost access to the countryside, we lost not only the opportunity to heal ourselves but the culture and knowledge that came with it. Learning whilst physically within a landscape offers us a sense of connection we are innately responsive to. Memories are formed using all our senses and our ability to recognise these plants is re-ignited. (Appendix 2) The purpose of trespass, for Right to Roam, is then not only about unsettling private property, but explicitly connecting the enclosure of land to the enclosure of situated, tacit, customary, folk 134 knowledge. Although intentional acts of trespass have been used by reams of social movements, Right to Roam trespasses are particularly proportional to the campaign’s explicit desire to exercise and eventually formalise a comprehensive right of access. A critical aspect of the campaign’s pursuit of relational access is proliferating forms of knowledge — of history, the political economy of land, of ecology — needed to reinvigorate belonging in land, regardless of who owns it. Right to Roam was not only hosting an educational event, but through trespass, invoking customary practices, refusing the law, and intervening in epistemic enclosure. Finishing the workshops, we stopped in a clearing in the woods for lunch. I was fizzing with enthusiasm. Being in place for a trespass also meant being around others interested in how land is used, owned and governed. I spoke with someone who had lived in the Climate Camps (Klimacamps) in Germany, and another who’d been at the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, a ‘trespasser’ at Stonehenge. Looking around at this multigenerational group, I wondered what was yet to come for the English land question. As we continued on our route, in a lull between programming, I walked with Jon and the documentarian, leaving the forest and walking down to a country road. We paused as a photo opportunity emerged: an old stone wall we could hop over. I jumped down as I’d jumped down the stairs as a child. Camera shutters and laughs filled the air. By this point, it seemed we’d all accepted the legitimacy of this action. Was it even worthy of being photographed? As each person passed over, the wall and the picture felt more and more inane, overflowing with significance to the point of saturation. Until now, we’d been on a walk, waiting for The Event. In the moment, it only felt significant because it was supposed to. We were simply walking in a field, towards a row of trees, crossing into terra incognita. I asked Jon how the campaign selects sites to trespass on. In this instance, he’d compared cadastral maps with contemporary Ordnance Survey maps, finding, below our very feet now, an ancient and unmapped 135 footpath. He moved aside a spool of red safety fencing, half-unravelled, blocking a natural opening between the trees and the wall. “This wasn’t here before,” he said, recalling his recce to the site. I realised he’d set up our walk to reinscribe the footsteps of people long passed. I looked down: there were no pineapple weeds nor desire paths below my feet — not yet. 4.2. Know Your Rights (and how to map) While Trespassing 4.2.1. The psychological barrier A month later, I was back in so-called Vancouver for classes. I met with Jon over Zoom to coordinate my fieldwork in line with upcoming trespasses and to see whether my research time could be helpful for the campaign. He also updated me on Right to Roam’s progress. With local groups emerging, they were a couple weeks away from the first ‘Know Your Rights While Trespassing’, a workshop to support those organising more localised trespasses — expected to be smaller and more frequent than the national team had capacity to organise. The purpose of these workshops was threefold. First, to discuss the rights and responsibilities of trespass, largely following the Scottish Outdoor Access Code. Second, to introduce several mapping tools in order to help with site selection, telling a story of the land throughout time. Third, and related, the primary purpose of the workshops is to help individuals overcome what Jon called the “psychological barrier” to trespass, another framing of Hayes’ “mindwall”. This was clearly important in the campaign’s recruitment of organisers and participants in acts of trespass. Based on my reading and training in critical cartography, I suspected the practice I had been using — the critical cartographic method of mental sketch mapping — would be primed to reveal the performativity of private property, including ‘psychological’ and phenomenological experiences felt by the individual. Beyond recruitment, I wanted to understand the formation and differentiation 136 of this “psychological barrier” depending on the place, on the size of the group, the intention of the trespass, and any other conditions — and why it was so prevalent among new trespassers in the first place. This focus enabled me to examine Right to Roam’s answer to the land question at the local scale, and the scale of the body. Jon put me in touch with Maria, who would take on the weighted responsibility for national coordination of local groups, and over the next few months, they welcomed my research into the Bristol workshop and a mapping-themed trespass, both in February 2023. 4.2.2. Roleplaying trespass When the Know Your Rights workshop had come around, I had spent my time in the UK conducting archival research into the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, a group of ramblers in the early 20th century who dabbled in trespass. I had also worked with members of the Bristol local group to plan a mapping-themed educational trespass for late February. A group of map enthusiasts, we had so far met to discuss the exercises we could facilitate, a few potential sites to recce, and, of course, examine some maps. For the workshop, I had prepared a short talk on my research. Building on my findings in the archives and training in critical cartography, I hoped to make the case that mental sketch mapping could be a good method to both address the psychological barrier and archive trespasses, ahead of our upcoming mapping-themed trespass. In this way, attendees could document their individual memories of customary use, to know one’s rights inhibited by epistemic enclosure. But first, Jon demonstrated to us how trespass could facilitate research and effective education if it was accompanied by a story situated in the site.43 To this end, he projected several 43 An example of a social media post detailing the typical structure of a Know Your Rights While Trespassing workshop can be found in a Facebook post advertising the first workshop (@Right to Roam 2022). 137 online mapping tools and open databases, introducing us to resources such as the Who Owns England investigation; the Don’t Lose Your Way map of unregistered rights of way; tax-exempt heritage assets register, the CAP payments register, and the National Library of Scotland Maps Archive, with which you can search for 19th and 20th century maps in order to compare them with more familiar Ordnance Survey maps. This map enables organisers to trace enclosures, particularly the enclosure of rights of way by identifying old footpaths. As Jon had demonstrated to me at Badminton, finding and retracing rights of way was one way into the story of enclosure. This can be difficult, he explained, if the orientation shifts with landscape change. Flagstones, furrows, boundary stones, and other landmarks differ across the country, indicating geological differences and particularities. While maps offer a partial historical record, ultimately you have to learn the landscape. It was clear this requires access, and by nature, access to enclosed land. Further, he showed us the UCL Legacies of British Slave Ownership map, pulling from data on compensation following the abolition of slave ownership. Particularly as Bristol and its surrounding areas have the highest number of records outside of London, Jon indicated this was a good starting point for the local group to incorporate into their ‘stories’ of trespass. Next, he outlined laws around trespass, empowering participants with legal knowledge. Dispelling the notion that ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’, he pointed out to the group that because trespass is a civil offence, one cannot be prosecuted by the state, as long as they do not cause “damage, disruption or distress” in their activities.44 This could include cutting a barbed wire fence in order to trespass, which would constitute a criminal offence. While the campaign had determined the scope of “damage, disruption and distress” can be avoided by following the 44 The language of “damage, disruption, distress” is drawn from the recent Police Act 2022 under section 84, which amends the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and was legislated to target Gypsy, Traveller and Romani communities and environmental activists (Burgum Jones Powell 2022). 138 Scottish Outdoor Access Code, I understood the ‘three Ds’ are vaguely defined, enrolling the discretionary power of the police and demonstrating the performativity of private property relations. However, it was also clear this brief introduction to the law could lower the ‘psychological barrier’ to trespass. This barrier is unique to each individual, and reflects the diverse ways property can be performed, as we explored in the next exercise. Jon invited us all to get into pairs to roleplay possible encounters with landowners, gamekeepers or other authorities. This was important, because the enforcement of trespass is at the discretion of the landowner, the operation of law an embodied performance. We read and discussed a list of creative strategies for de-escalation, in a style akin to a school drama class and rousing the same amount of laughter. With one individual assigned to act as the landowner, the other would play out a trespass strategy. These strategies demonstrate the peaceful, largely non-confrontational nature of the campaign as well as the performativity of property. In giving individuals the tools to respond to differing relations with landowners, they also highlight how these relations are deeply informed by the context in which they occur, and the rationality of the landowner. During the roleplay, we took it in turns to act as landowner and ‘trespasser’, therefore experiencing what it would be like to justify one’s ownership and also one’s use. Perhaps as I was aware of the conditions of criminal trespass, I was more inclined to roleplay a more aggressive landowner, who threatened to enrol the support of gamekeepers and call the police. This resulted in my partner obeying my direction to leave. In the reverse position, my partner did the same, and I aimed to justify my use differently. It was clear that the roleplaying was helpful independent of the outcome, if only because most of us did not have experience in trespass whatsoever. In literally performing the encounter, and negotiating our use, we began to address our ‘psychological 139 barriers’. When it came to an actual trespass, of course, these would vary in relation to contextual factors; specific performances of property. It was now my turn to address the “mindwall”, and articulate my broader conception of terra incognita heretofore defined as epistemic enclosure. I introduced my research and the practice of mental sketch mapping, inviting people to the mapping-themed trespass we were holding later that month. I handed out copies of the mental sketch map I took at the Botany Unbound trespass, as an example, as well as copies of maps produced by the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers in the early 20th century (Appendix 3). Some of the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers had participated in the Kinder Scout and Winter Hill mass trespasses of 1932, and its founder, George Ward, was a prominent campaigner for land access reform in the lead up to the Access to Mountains Act 1939. I wanted to show other participants in trespass that there was precedent for the use of critical cartography in trespass and to challenge epistemic enclosure through archiving it. For the purposes of this thesis, I weave the information I shared into a broader discussion of post-representational cartography and performativity theory, arguing the practice of mental sketch mapping is partial, processual, and performative, and justifying its use for this study of trespass. 4.2.2. Mental sketch mapping as post-representational Before I introduce the cartographic practice of mental sketch mapping, I must first set it in its context. Cartography is a subdiscipline of geography concerned with the representation of space. Historically, cartographic approaches to navigation or spatial cognition have been split between empirical (cognitive cartography) and critical approaches (more recently, post- 140 representational cartography).45 From the 1960s, cognitive cartographers were focused on how individuals form ‘cognitive maps’ through navigating their environment. In The Image of the City, a landmark text, urban planner Kevin Lynch developed an analytic framework still used by geographers today, finding individuals construct cognitive maps by identifying paths, paths, landmarks, edges, nodes, and districts. These components structure space, make complex urban environments ‘legible’, and to each we imbue subjective experiences and meanings.46 In the lesser known Mental Maps by Peter Gould and Rodney White deploy qualitative and quantitative methods, compiling individual accounts into larger datasets indicating spatial preference or attachment. Lack of information about a place, they found, resulted in less careful discrimination between otherwise distinct areas. In other words, less experience with a place — whether real or imagined — led to greater uncertainty and distinction. The production of space also results in negative space: terra incognita. Gould and White also suggest more knowledge of a place, gained through experience, had a direct relationship to the granularity of one’s spatial perception, finding "people's emotional attachment falls off very steeply with distance" (1974 42). For instance, their work with children living on both sides of the border between Sweden and Norway revealed “the 45 Neuroscientists studying navigation also offer interesting insights, although it is a nascent and fast-developing subfield. In the 1970s, John O’Keefe had been examining the hippocampus in the brain to research memory when he noticed neural activity in the brain: cells firing that were coding for location. He called these “place cells”, and we now know that they code for speed, directionality, boundaries and borders in the environment (Kemp 2022). As place cells are still being identified across the brain, neuroscientists consider our capacity to navigate as a whole brain event, however, some consider memory and navigation to be so closely linked in the hippocampus as to be indistinguishable (De Brigard 2014). Our cognitive maps are constructed through sensory perception over time and space, and structured by these place cells. While conscious, and perhaps while dreaming, we are always using our cognitive maps, and indeed it is believed the left side of the hippocampus maintains a constant ‘memory trace’ of routes. However, the production of cognitive maps is uneven across individuals. Research suggests the deficits in spatial navigation and orientation are an indicator for early onset Alzheimer’s, with these abilities rapidly deteriorating with the progression of the disease (Coughlan et al. 2018). Further, place cells are not inherently traceable to the immediate material world, meaning we can have cognitive maps of fictional places and future spatial imaginaries based on our interpretation, indeed our experience, of other spatial representations (Kemp 2022). 46 Paths connect between two areas and give a sense of enclosure; edges are perceived boundaries like walls; districts are large areas with a shared identity or character; nodes are focal points like intersections; and landmarks are unique and identifiable objects which act as reference points (Lynch 1960). 141 boundary has a very severe effect upon the flows of information to children only a few miles apart in geographic space.” (1974 146) As I will further explore, the psychological barrier is performed, made real materially — not only on the ground, of course, but in our cognitive maps. From the 1980s onwards, however, critics argued cognitive cartography was too “mechanistic, reductionistic and uncritical” (Rossetto 2012 9). As global positioning systems (GPS) emerged in the 1990s, critical cartographers began to demonstrate that dependence on navigational technologies that deploy abstract compositions of space not only weaken our cognitive maps and spatial intelligence (Lobben et al. 2009), but facilitate greater surveillance of individual mobilities (Pickles 2004), even degrading resolution in contexts of dispossession to suppress public knowledge (Zerbini and Fradley 2018). When mapping navigational practices, some critical cartographers argue they have a responsibility to clearly convey the constant flows and mobilities we navigate in the world (November, Camacho-Hübner and Latour 2010 596). More recently, such focus on movement and process in cartography has led to an approach called post-representational cartography, which argues cartography should be understood as processual rather than representational (Kitchin and Dodge 2007; 2013). In other words, no map is ever complete, but “continually re-made every time someone engages with them” (Rossetto 2012 32). As a result, maps cannot be separated from the process of cartographic production, nor its embodied, situated context.47 This process and context must also be subject to critical analysis. Mental sketch mapping has been used to represent cognitive maps for decades, with researchers exploring navigational structures and spatial memory. But in 2013, critical cartographer Jack Jen Gieseking published a landmark paper that consolidated its use into a 47 Further, maps themselves “open up ‘mental spaces’ beyond spatial structures”, “are also influenced by stories, novels and films”, and “are deeply intertwined in oral culture” (Caquard 2015, citing Wood and Fels, 2008; Tuan 1975; Wickens Pearce, 2014). These imaginations may complicate our study of cognitive maps, but remain situated in an embodied context nonetheless. 142 methodological framework and model, examining its components and analytics. Tracing the method back to Lynch, Gieseking’s work bridges cognitive and post-representational approaches, both of which are interested in the formation of subjective spatial knowledge (Rossetto 2012). The very form of mental sketch mapping makes visible the embodied and situated context of its production. I draw on Gieseking’s work, arguing that mental sketch mapping of one’s everyday property relations engages both the cognitive map and expanding abstractions of capitalist political economy, which are both performed and remembered. Mental sketch maps are not only partial and processual, but performative. 4.2.3. As partial and processual Mental maps are simply representations of cognitive maps, and while Gieseking understands this term can refer to the labelling of maps or computer-assisted production of maps, their elaboration and application of mental sketch mapping is focused specifically on hand-sketched maps, asking participants to sketch out their experience of a space as it is remembered within the context of an interview. In encouraging participants to pay granular attention to their own experiences, the aim of the exercise is to be accurate to their subjective, situated, spatial knowledge rather than a more abstracted or generalised representation of place (2013 715). The forms of these “mental maps to be processual and representational, that is, never complete”, and “never fully remembered” (Gieseking 2013 713). Because the inherently processual nature of mental sketch mapping is acknowledged, the analytic focus is on memory, and I argue opens up the method to be used as an ongoing practice and intervention in epistemic enclosure. As I demonstrated to attendees at the Know Your Rights workshop, we can see the partial and processual nature of sketch mapping through the work of George Ward, founder of the 143 Sheffield Clarion Ramblers. For over five decades in the early 20th century, Ward produced intricate sketch maps of the Peak District, published in annual pocket-sized handbooks for the group.48 Alongside descriptions of routes, and pictures of landmarks like peaks, stone circles, and the boundary stones and guides Jon had mentioned, the delicate fold-out sketch maps — reproductions of larger hand-drawn maps — were carefully glued in, suitable for transportation in the pocket of a rambler. As he was involved in lobbying for the Access to Mountains Act 1939, the handbooks also contained updates on legislation and campaigns, fieldnotes, anecdotes of encounters with gamekeepers, rambling songs, pastoral poetry, and short stories, evidencing the continuity of enclosure into the 20th century. 49 Although a self-styled socialist, Ward was considered pragmatic, excellent at negotiating with landowners, with his campaign work facilitating a community purchase of the Longshaw Estate from the Duke of Rutland in 1927 (Sissons, Howard and Smith 2017). His success is in part attributable to the wealth of knowledge cultivated by the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers when walking and trespassing through the Peak District. Through his sketch maps, Ward encouraged his peers to question codified boundaries of property and designated rights-of-way instituted by local landowners, and in doing so perform them differently. On a sketch map of the Upper Derwent and Westend Valleys, he outlines the ancient trenched land boundaries and unrecorded place names, making clear his original cartographic contributions while encouraging the reader to “add for himself” new roads, boundary walls and plantations made through recent enclosures. He continues: “Old tracks recorded include the worst path stealing in the Peak. Delineation of tracks do not, necessarily, indicate a present 48 The SCR was founded in 1900. I found handbooks from 1907 to 2012, although by 1962 they noted they could no longer afford to print beyond the necessary announcements and route descriptions. From 1962 to 2012, the handbooks’ characteristic depth and breadth of information was amiss. 49 In one entry, Ward discusses Enclosure Acts applied in the Ewden and Little Don Valleys from 1778 to 1854, having interviewed a local resident, Mr Will Dramall of Bradfield, who remembers its effects on commoners. (Ward 1924/25 151) 144 right of way.” (Appendix 3) In this way, Ward’s maps are explicitly processual, requiring the attention of maker and user to changing performances of property. It was also common for Ward to label maps with relevant references to parliamentary acts of enclosure. On his sketch map of Burbage Moor, for instance, he references Dore Enclosure Acts passed in 1757 and 1833 alongside road names. Situated within the handbooks, his sketch maps help us remember continued resistance to epistemic enclosure, providing detailed insights into the land politics of the Peak District and mid-century land reforms. 4.2.4. As performative While Gieseking shows us the mental sketch mapping method is partial and processual, they also argue it is performative. In A Queer New York, Gieseking uses multi- and inter-generational mental sketch mapping interviews to demonstrate the queer production of urban space over time and space. They deploy the theory of performativity as advanced by Judith Butler, defining it as a “process-oriented, nonfoundational, ceaseless performance of one’s being”, inscribed on the body and, drawing on Elizabeth Grosz, mutually defined “through societies, economies, and politics that support recognition, as well as the pressure for and possibility of agency and access.” (2020 12; citing Butler 1989 1993 and Grosz 1996) In parallel, Gieseking articulates how mental sketch mapping brings “mapping to the scale of the body”, evokes spatial memory, “keeping participants focused on the discussion of space and place, and helping to articulate injustices and inequalities” (2013 722). It is therefore a method that reveals the performativity of queerness in urban space. Gieseking distinguishes lgbtq, lesbian and/or queer place-making from white, cis, gay and/or heterosexual place-making, illustrating that lesbian-queer space appears in ‘constellations’ while white and/or cis gay and/or heterosexual male space 145 is territorially fixed by virtue of their ability to acquire and retain private property. In doing so, they can go beyond “the long-term fixation on the lgbtq, lesbian, and/or queer neighborhood was tied to the white heteropatriarchal promise of territory and project of ownership, as well as processes of gentrification” (xviii), arguing the form of constellations recognises and pieces together the lesbian-queer “geographical imagination for reading the city that does not succumb to liberation-through property ownership.” (10) Thus, the discussions of space and place are grounded in material conditions and differentiated property relations. However, while property ownership recurs throughout the book as a way to demonstrate differentiated property relations across race, gender and sexuality, their use of the mental sketch mapping method is not as an explicit investigation into the performativity of property, as explored most prominently by Nick Blomley. It could be. I argue there is a clear opportunity to draw further connections between performativity theories of gender and the body, and property and the body, using mental sketch mapping to articulate the production of space including the commodification of land. To future trespassers before me, I aimed to demonstrate the continued importance of situated knowledge production in shaping land politics in England, expanding on the tools Jon had introduced to us — including the Who Owns England map, and the trespass roleplays — to argue for the use of critical cartographic methods to engage with our own relations to land. To do so, I gave a brief history of property mapping in England, drawing on Blomley and Pottage to articulate the shift from the court of survey to spatialised cadastral surveying. This, I emphasised, had an impact on the performance of use-rights, both in their representation in land surveys, and in the cognitive map of the surveyors, owners and eventually other users. While the court of survey was constructed “with the help of those tenants whose memories went back the furthest” (Taylor 1947 239), the 146 cadastral survey “was no longer a description of the use-rights that inhered in a particular site, but a rendering of land as a bounded parcel of space.” (Blomley 2019 239) To perform this “entailed a remarkable cognitive shift”, with surveyors being advised to “first imagine the manor as an abstract space, walking or riding around the manor once or twice so ‘that you may have as it were a Map of it in your head’”. Thus even the production of maps involved in the commodification of land were situated and embodied, but in their performance of private property they abstract heterogenous land relations into boundaries of ownership. This process is another form of the progressive spatialisation of property from which modern laws of trespass emerge (McDonagh and Griffin 2016). It is possible, despite such forms of epistemic enclosure, to perform land differently: through trespass and through mental sketch mapping. Going beyond even the court of survey, sketch maps can include different sensory experiences, perspectives, landmarks, interactions with other people and forms of life, including interactions with landowners. In doing so, the map will be more accurate to one’s situated experience, representing and performing why a particular trespass walk is significant. They can tell a personal and political story, translating a heterogeneity of experiences between and within social groupings. Perhaps there is also further potential for mental sketch mapping to facilitate multi-scalar analysis, from the body to the conceptualisation of abstract processes such as racial capitalism, capital accumulation and epistemic enclosure, all of which enrol cartographic practices (including, more recently, the production of satellite imagery.)50 Although it is one of his “least articulated theories”, postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson’s essay on cognitive mapping remains incredibly productive for scholars concerned with representing capitalist social formations today (Toscano 50 US-based geospatial data companies — including Google Earth — are subject to the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment under the US National Defense Authorization Act 1997. This amendment limits the production and commercial sale of high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel-Palestine, so these companies, who are dominant in the US, are compelled to degrade image resolution in line with foreign competitors (Zerbini and Fradley, 2018). 147 and Kinkle 2014 22). Jameson understands cognitive mapping as a way to examine social space and class relations; a method to remedy social disorientation under late capitalism. Drawing on Lynch’s cognitive mapping, and Althusser’s definition of ideology as a representation of one’s imaginary relationship to the ‘Real’ world, Jameson compared an individual’s inability to navigate a city with the individual’s inability to conceptualise capitalism and its imperial entanglements, suggesting that cognitive mapping could bridge everyday perception and the expanding abstractions of capitalist political economy (Jameson 1990; Toscano and Kinkle, 2014). Unlike the cognitive and critical cartographers discussed, he does not elucidate a cartographic method, instead using the term “cognitive mapping” in a more metaphorical sense, as has become popular. However, he argues cognitive maps may help us cope with the socio-spatial complexity in postmodern society, as they bridge abstract and subjective experiences of place. Citing Althusser and Balibar, he stresses there is a political need to use cognitive maps to locate “the necessary invisible connection between the field of the visible and the field of the invisible”, the latter being abstract economic processes (Althusser and Balibar 1970 19). Indeed, Toscano and Kinkle extend Jameson to understand cognitive mapping as an aesthetic, arguing artworks and narratives would need to be didactic and pedagogical in nature, identifying cracks or levers in capitalist systems (Toscano and Kinkle 2014). While their analysis focuses on cultural forms, rather than the mental sketch mapping method, it is clear the method could be used to identify cracks and levers through their uneven territorialisation: the heterogenous performance of property relations. I argue that with a more concrete basis in the performativity of property, as articulated by Blomley, it is possible to understand mental sketch mapping as a critical attunement to our embodied perception of property relations enacted in space. Indeed, building on Gieseking’s work, I will show that mental sketch mapping of one’s everyday property relations 148 engages both the cognitive map and expanding abstractions of capitalist political economy, which are both performed and remembered. Beginning with this scale, it may or may not be possible to extend further into a multiscalar analysis of capitalist political economy’s expanding abstractions. But compared to abstracted cadastral maps, the situated and partial nature of our experiences in relation to land (including other life) is made visible, but also demonstrates the processual and open-endedness of memory. In this sense, I hoped to contribute to the “Know Your Rights” workshop through documenting a memory of our customary rights threatened and extinguished by epistemic enclosure, to know one’s rights through the acts of trespass Right to Roam have encouraged. Maps are employed in processes of dispossession or the commodification of space, and equally the de-commodification of space depends on our cognitive maps. Therefore, resistance to enclosure requires critical cartographic interventions. Closing my short talk, I invited the room to our upcoming mapping trespass. While we had not yet selected the site, I knew I would be facilitating a mental sketch mapping exercise, and we could be returning to Badminton. Over the course of three more trespasses, and the interviews that would follow, I demonstrate how sites of trespass can be categorised as ‘soft’ or ‘hard’, depending on their specific performances of private property over time. I borrow this framing from one of my participants, whom I asked how their relationship to the estate had changed over the course of three visits to Badminton Estate: I think I feel much more inclined to go back there and wander around wherever I like. There’s something I did think of earlier — you might find that in some respect, I see [Badminton] as a soft target, because there’s lots of people wandering around there anyway. [...] I guess it depends on what you do and why you do it. You could easily go to Badminton to walk down paths you’re not supposed to go to, or make it a hard trespass to go there [in other ways]. That makes for a different point of view. (Interview with Paul, February 2023, my emphasis) 149 The specific combination of performances of property, and the extent to which they are disciplining and exclusionary, therefore affect relationships to land and memory of place. 4.3. Mapping unknown lands 4.3.1. The soft recce On a Friday in mid-February, I returned to Badminton with Maria, picking up our co-organiser Paul on the way. In the car, he told us how each time he revisited his favourite walks across Somerset, different details in the landscape revealed themselves to him. But as we arrived, I had to almost entirely reconfigure my memory of the estate from last summer. The bleak midwinter had stripped the long grasses and lush oaks of last August to their bare bones. The geese barked in formation. Maria and I took turns informally guiding our little contingent into the footpath; through the fields and forests. From afar, the plantations were dense and the ground scarred by mud tracks, but within the forest clearing, we found ourselves amongst blankets of bright copper leaves; trunks matted with wet green moss. Maria and Paul handled dead bark growing bright red mushrooms, and lichen in muted green and mustard. Acutely aware of their expertise in botany and ecology, I sought to follow their line of sight, but mine tripped up on the signs denoting “Private Road: Strictly No Vehicles” and “No Horsebox Parking” that I had first encountered last summer. After a year of mapping signs of trespass, these performances of private property have become my kind of landmark. After we left the forest, Maria opened the latch of a seven-foot-tall wooden gate with ease, taking us further down the vista. It was part of a long stone wall, maybe forty feet away from where we jumped over last summer, pretending journalists weren’t taking pictures of us. Today, the gate was such a straightforward entryway into the estate’s inner sanctum that I questioned whether this 150 wall was the legal threshold. Indeed, I wondered if I labelled the wrong place on my initial sketch map from August. That day, I had been swept up in so many conversations, following the herd led by Jon Moses, but today, our walk was overlaid with careful attention and comments about what would make the best route. No jumping this time, we agreed. Rather than having lunch in the forest clearing, we would stop about halfway between the gate and Badminton House — unless it rained. A straight walk from the forest down to the vista would keep us within time, an important factor given the colder weather. As we walked, I wrote down my landmarks and took photographs for the rest of the organisers, but neither my drawing pad nor the landscape included encounters with landowners. These field notes increased my attention to our tentative route, and just as they aided our future conversation, also supplemented the mental sketch map I would draw after our walk. A new trust had developed between us three that day. We had paid attention to what we all considered was most safe and suitable for the strangers that would soon join us here again. Our cognitive maps weaved closer together. 4.3.2. The hard recce My next trespass was by no means a pleasant Saturday walk through the countryside. Accompanied by two friends, I had the time to seek out another potential site, hoping to find interesting topography and the source of a major river. By this stage, my co-organisers for the mapping trespass had decided on the different components of the day — pattern ecology mapping, word mapping, and the mental sketch mapping exercise. This site, with steep hills, a valley, and a potential spring, could make the exercises more dynamic and potentially challenging. But rather than a successful search for such landmarks, my recon revealed major bulwarks to that plan. Rather than wide open spaces with loud and high-flying geese, we heard gunshots ripple through the 151 valley, and encountered the necks of crows pierced through barbed wire. As well as multicoloured lichen, tree trunks were home to mounted birdhouses, innocent enough, until I found traps set inside, and indeed, at the base of our feet, more for rabbits. I supposed I hadn’t quite processed the reality of previous pictures I’d seen posted on Twitter, where some trespassers had exposed similar crimes committed against nature, and often, also to the state. More specifically, perhaps, I hadn’t felt it in my body as I did now. We took pictures as evidence and headed on our way. A car rumbled up the road behind us. As we turned, the Land Rover stopped, and two men dressed as gamekeepers asked us what we were doing. “This is private land. How did you get here?” I froze, the words I’d used in roleplays now somehow inaccessible. Instead my friend spoke for us. “We’re looking for the source of the river,” she cracked. “We got lost.” The gamekeepers looked at one another, seemingly towering above us. “That’s on the other side of the hill. How did you get here?” We knew there was only one way we could have: through a hawthorn bush and a barbed wire, too memorable to forget. “There was a gap in the fence.” “Where?” — they seemed urgent to patch it up. “Over there,” we pointed, and said we’d be on our way back in that direction. As they drove off and we headed up the road, catching our breath to stymie our racing hearts, I noticed, to our left, some tepid blue-algae water that accumulated in a man-made channel, all bricked up and out of place. We should have brought a water testing kit, I thought, it would have made us more legitimate. My internal compass oriented towards the source of the water, north of us. At the beginning of the public footpath, we found it. My eyes followed as the spring bubbled into a beautiful brook, then flowed under a brand new green metal fence. On the left of our path, this demonstration of wealth was unending, corralling us into a straight line and out of acres of green fields. On our right, an assortment of “Private: Keep Off” signs led to older wooden 152 fencing that periodically stopped and started — altogether a confusing enrollment of private property. To my left, I picked up a plastic white label that read ‘June 2022’ — I deduced this referred to the date of the fence’s production or erection, having since fallen onto the ground. To my right, more dead birds, their partially rotten carcasses hung over the wood. Perhaps it was our recent trespass, but I felt vigilant. This footpath felt private, although I knew otherwise. These corpses were nonchalant, almost routine assertions of power, visible because they were at little risk of being challenged, or perhaps, the underlying actions prevented. The accountability mechanism here was weak. Along the path, we met fellow walkers, local to the area and regular users of this pathway. I asked one man about the fence, who he couldn’t remember when it was put up. It was recent, I thought. Had he already normalised it? Then we encountered a couple with three dogs, for whom they apologised for jumping up at the carcasses. They told us they wanted this fencing for their garden to protect their roses from deer. At the end of the strait, we saw the unusually shaped valley I was hoping for, accompanied by a twinge of vertigo in my stomach. The footpath continued down onto the road, but it felt different. Indeed, we caught an eye of the backend of the house, a reminder of our recent close encounter. As we neared the open driveway, we saw another dead bird over a wall — a pigeon, no less. What are you doing here, friend? Not two seconds later a uniformed man, wearing a badge labelled ‘Head of Security’, emerged from behind a topiary bush. “We asked you to leave,” he asserted. “We were concerned by this bird,” we explained, far more confidently than before. Indeed, I’d also never encountered such securitisation of land before. It didn’t matter that we were technically on a public footpath. Following his direction, and indeed, the trespasser’s protocol, we complied, looping back up the path and hearing the beep of a walkie talkie and his words, “three females”, behind us. Chills passed down my spine. Our former indiscretion had enrolled in the channels of communication 153 that govern this particular estate — I felt like an interminable trespasser, regardless of my lawful use. There was no way I’d be able to lead the group here. Like the tweets I’d seen before, drawing my mental sketch map for this ‘hard’ trespass felt more like giving testimony for a crime.51 I would instead return to Badminton, my third trespass. 4.3.3. A day of trespass On the last Sunday in February, we met in Didmarton village hall and thanked the weather gods. It was a little cold, a little windy, but the clouds were light: alright for a day of trespass on Badminton Estate. Once Maria, Paul, and our co-organiser Mark had collected two dozen of us, we began the day in the same clearing Jon had opened Botany Unbound. Mark introduced the day in a similar fashion, regaling our rights and responsibilities, and then asked everyone to start making note of keywords that emerged to us throughout the day. Each individual was left with a thread they’d chosen, serving as a map of landmarks personal to their experience. Mine began with “dog”. As we started up the footpath, and, again, began to learn about each other through conversation, we encountered our first ‘stranger’ — a golden labrador pacing across our shared right of way. “Sorry!”, its ‘owners’ said. Their dog was deaf, and off the lead, would often get excited by other forms of life without hearing their call for him. Their apologies 51 Situated testimony is a research practice used to reconstruct traumatic or violent events, developed by Forensic Architecture, an investigative research lab. The lab reconstructs individuals’ experiences in 3D architectural models, using these models as an aid in interviews, and finds “the use of digital architectural models has a productive effect on a witness’s recollection” (Forensic Architecture 2024). The method stems from founder Eyal Weizman’s longstanding interest in cognitive maps. In cases where supporting evidence cannot be gathered to support a testimony, Weizman argues the use of models help constitute a relation between the allocentric map and egocentric perspective to reconstruct place from memory. “We do not want to create secondary memories; we don’t want the memory of the reenactment to become mixed with and distort the original memory,” he says. “But in this process, in this constant search for memory, things slowly get aligned.” (Axel and Weizman 2020) In this way, the lab’s use of situated testimony is concerned with using individual memories to reconstruct an image of place. While these trespasses are far less traumatic and violent than FA’s models of warzones and experiences of the Grenfell Tower Fire, I use mental sketch mapping to process the ‘psychological barrier’ to trespass. 154 suggested they were not The Landowners, but, as I soon remembered, it didn’t matter — we were all still walking on a public footpath. My second word was “dance”. Paul led us to the edge of the forest, where our route diverged from the mass trespass last summer. A former ecologist, he explained how he left the profession, feeling constrained in his capacity to hold landowners accountable for their management of land. As he would later explain to me, in our interview: The regulatory system that covers protected sites doesn’t cover protected sites, because it's inadequate. It protects it from things that the owner might do, but it doesn’t even have the mechanism to protect it from what anyone who isn’t the owner might do. If you own a field and it’s protected, you need to come to me to get permissions to do lots of operations on there. It’s listed. But there’s nothing to protect that site from the airborne deposition of nitrogen, which is at limit. We set limits, but the regulatory limits are so out of date anyway, they keep massaging the figures to — ‘ooh it’s 1%’, ‘is it 1%?’ — it’s time to call bullshit. So that’s why I left. You get into this story of ‘I need to do that to do this,’ and it’s actually no, walk away, walk away and trespass. [...] I would love to go back to holding what three or four year old [Paul had when he felt he was the little wild one, a hedgerow creature. I want the real magic of that back. The felt aliveness of that back. [...] That’s my task in life now, is to work that… to try and draw people into seeing. (Interview with Paul, February 2022) Introducing his exercise, Paul asked us all to head out with clipboards and a different way of seeing: identifying opposite and alternate patterns in nature. These were “the structural basic pattern of plants,” he explained. Rather than act as he once did, an ecologist focusing on an “individual” plant species, we could use this time to pay attention to its influence on others. We dispersed, silently noting features across the field and the adjacent forest. To me, these emerged as textures: first the stone wall communicating to us; then the chatter of a coal tit communicating with its relatives. The frequency of the trees blowing in the wind. My grasp on a nettle, so its follicles fold in one direction and I evade the sting, as my mum had taught me while we foraged for soup as a child. After we collected our patterns, we reported back, one by one, with many of our observations overlapping. We were within “spheres of influence,” Paul suggested. “We feel 155 the effects of other humans very strongly. Loads of you I recognise now for this short time.” While I can’t remember much of it, Paul broke out into a spontaneous dance and invited us to wave in the wind like trees. To my surprise, we all did: an initially awkward circle of strangers turned into fellow folk. Once the dance was done, we split off again into new configurations of conversation. Third, “memory”. As we had decided on the recce, instead of continuing straight down the east of Bullpark Wood, and then turning right on the road, we turned right to follow its northern edge, then cutting down to expose ourselves to the full three miles of the chase. With everyone around us now, I realised this topography was just as interesting as the hard trespass, if not more. The chase had been constructed with multiple rolling hills, altering our perception of distance from Badminton House at one end, and the giant stone arch behind us. My conversation with a fellow trespasser about the privatisation of public land transfixed me as we passed through the gate and up another hill. Apparently I’d missed another set of walkers now well behind us. As one of the guides, I re-focused my eye spotting a couple of dogs and a couple dressed in tweed over in the next field. Were they The Landowners? They looked over at us and kept on walking, no intention of contact. The day passed without an encounter. Three trespasses in one place? I marked this place as safe to return to. Fourth, “connections”. By the time we’d had lunch and headed back up the chase, the setting sun broke through the clouds, just in time to illuminate the mental sketch mapping exercise. As everyone sat down in a circle, and I lay out pencil cases, clipboards and paper, and I glanced at my notes once, for comfort. As part of my research, I explained, I want to understand how trespass affects our relationships to land. To start my spiel, I spontaneously asked my fellow ‘trespassers’ to guess at what ‘mental map’ could be. One person offered up ‘mind map’, a spider-like diagram 156 used to organise pieces of written information.52 My nerves subsided. This was useful, because I was able to introduce the exercise in relation to a tool that might be more familiar to others. Rather than connecting discrete pieces of information, we were going to draw out our individual experiences of the day. “Write yourself into the map,” I prompted. “What do you use to navigate? Where did your body, eyes, and mind wander? What did you touch or hear? Did these experiences lead to any interesting thoughts or chats with others? Label them. What is important for you to remember, that may or may not be recorded on your bog-standard OS map? What moved or changed in the land during our day?” As everyone began drawing, I paid attention to any cues that someone could be ruminating or getting frustrated, and spoke with them. “It only has to be accurate to your experience,” I explained, and perhaps fifteen minutes later, asked them to share their sketch maps with a partner and discuss them. Laughter and more additions to the maps ensued. As the wind picked up, I brought the exercise to an end, handing out information about my research and inviting anyone who was interested in continuing the discussion to participate in the study. One young person came up to me and asked if I would take the maps away. “Of course not, it’s yours to keep,” I replied. They looked relieved. Taken aback by the interaction, I came to two realisations. First, in drawing the mental sketch maps, my fellow trespassers had not only represented their performances of property on the page, but re-performed them, including any positive attachments they developed in relation to the land we had passed through. They demonstrated how they had enacted certain land relations within enclosed space, and through comparison, had reconstructed individual and collective memories of the day. Second, this person had understood my power and authority as a guide and researcher to expropriate these maps for use in my research. In asking, they wanted to know whether they needed to take a picture of it, to 52 This educational tool was popularised by Tony Buzan, who lived in Kitsilano on Coast Salish territories in so-called Vancouver, where I lived for most of this research. 157 remember the day, to enrol their memories in a different form. I wondered whether other researchers had extracted from them like this in the past. This memory has become a landmark for me, insofar as I remember what it felt like to risk losing someone’s trust, to recognise the authority vested in me by the academy, to realise, then, my own potential to appropriate must be consciously, actively denied through performative acts otherwise. In the next section, I enter into dialogue with participants in this study. While I have been entrusted with their maps and aim to accurately represent their experiences, I ultimately remain the author of this story, and realise the responsibility that bears. 4.4. Tracing terra incognita 4.4.1. Approach I conducted four semi-structured interviews with five individuals who participated in the ‘Mapping unknown lands’ trespass in February 2023. This close focus on participants and their mental sketch maps enables a granular comparative analysis to more clearly highlight the breadth and variety of experiences within the collective group. I conducted a 2-hour group interview with three participants, a 1-hour interview, and two 1-hour interviews with a co-organiser of the trespass. In each interview, we revisited the mental sketch maps; and in the group interview we were able to exchange mental sketch maps for group discussion, although one participant forgot to bring her map. I adapted questions to focus on her memory of place and making the map; while she used others’ maps as reference points, and gestures to navigate us through her experience. As expected, we spent less time discussing her map, but she was equally as engaged in comparative discussion of maps and the broader themes. In this section, I include copies of five mental sketch maps, including my own, and reference the missing mental sketch map where it was discussed 158 during the interview as the participant was able to reference their mental sketch map from memory. Interviews ranged from 1 to 2 hours each. I conducted the group interview in-person in Bristol, and all three one-on-one interviews over video call: using Zoom’s screen sharing function, we were able to discuss scans of the mental sketch maps. While I used the same questions for each interview, in the group interview I included additional questions to facilitate the exchange and discussion of each other’s mental sketch maps. My approach was to conduct semi-structured interviews that were more conversational and co-constructed allowing greater opportunities for interviewees to explore their answers in dialogue (Burgess 1984; Skinner 2012). All participants have been anonymised. In the following empirical analysis, I first introduce the participants and discuss their responses to the mental sketch mapping method. Drawing from our discussions of the trespass at Badminton, with participants using their sketch maps as aides for memory, I show how trespass and mental sketch maps are performative in this context, enrolling collective meaning and memory in land otherwise enclosed to us. I focus on the ‘moment’ of trespass and the scale with which trespassers answer the English land question. In each of the interviews, themes around land politics in England emerged from our discussion of the mental sketch maps and following my questions. These themes included national identity; democratic processes around land use; historical education; and differences in access rights regimes across the British Isles, Europe and the United States. This demonstrates Right to Roam’s impact on some of its participants in February 2023, and the capacity for a broader English land question through further use of trespass and mental sketch mapping. 159 4.4.2. Retracing routes I began each interview asking participants about where they live, how long they have lived there, and how well they feel they know the area; and second, whether ‘Mapping unknown lands’ was their first intentional trespass. These icebreakers helped engage participants — all of whom are permanent residents in the city of Bristol, about half an hour from Badminton Estate by car — in themes of land attachment and spatial knowledge.53 The day after the trespass, I interviewed Caroline, a woman in her mid-forties. She can’t remember having intentionally trespassed, until she became one of the earliest members of Right to Roam Bristol, which began to organise trespasses after Nick Hayes visited the city during his book tour for The Book of Trespass in early 2022: We did some trespasses that were much less organised. [...] There wasn’t a theme in particular. People would just turn up, go for a walk, connect with each other and the land, and talk about what it was like. That happened once a month as well. (Caroline) The next day, I interviewed Beth, Tom and Nigel together in a group interview, where I was more embedded as interviewer and fellow trespasser. For Beth and Nigel, a woman in her twenties and a man in his forties, the trespass was their first “intentional trespass”, although they may have trespassed accidentally in the past. Tom, a man in his twenties, began trespassing just before lockdown, leaving London on short trips to go “camping where [he] shouldn’t be.” I also interviewed Paul, one of the co-organisers of the trespass. His first intentional trespass was “a long, long time ago”, as a young teenager, but the practice is now becoming more routine, a way of developing a relationship to the local area in which he’s lived for over a decade: Covid actually changed my relationship with the land quite a lot. Before, for 25 years, I was an ecologist. So I’ve had this — always going to really incredible places which have got this sort of added extra layer of biodiversity. I realised I spent a lot of my life before that [...] looking to the further away places for my sustenance for the land. Snowdonia, 53 For instance, one participant moved to a new area of Bristol seven months before the interview. He said he’s still getting to know the area but is “still having to resort to Google Maps” and is “feeling a bit humiliated by that process.” 160 Brecon Beacons, Scotland way, and maybe a bit abroad. And realising my relationship has changed to the point now where it’s like, if I’m going to have a really meaningful experience with the land, it’s gonna happen here. It can as likely happen here and it needs to happen here. It might be that the seeds are planted in a far off, wild place, but the important thing is the connection to land and to land being this thing that underlies all human infrastructure. (Paul) In this section, I show how mental sketch maps act as memory aids for the trespass at Badminton. Both the trespass and mapping perform a heterogeneity of land relations beyond the ownership model, even within enclosed space. As each participant began to cite their mental sketch maps to explain the day of trespass during interviews, the breadth of experience amongst even these five participants was increasingly apparent. There remains significant variation in form of the sketches included, despite each participant having access to coloured pencils or A4 drawing paper provided, or their own notebooks.54 54 Most participants, as in this group, opted for standard pencils or pens. Each participant scanned in their mental sketch map after the interview. Although I adjusted the contrast and saturation of each image for clarity, I decided to retain the ruled pages and binder where they occur in scans. 161 Figure 3 Caroline’s mental sketch map Figure 3. Caroline’s mental sketch map of ‘Mapping unknown lands’, Badminton Estate, February 2023. Labels in chronological order: ‘Things often start & end in a carpark’; ‘birds don’t care about these boundaries’; ‘deaf labrador’; ‘the moss shines here’; ‘womb’; ‘you can breathe here’; ‘in a circle’; ‘ancestral elders’; ‘gatherings’; ‘circles’; ‘young & old’; ‘city dwellers long for the rural’; ‘all the places we didn’t go’; ‘legends, tales, stories cannot all be told by history’; ‘endless drive’; ‘God’s gate’; ‘castle on a cloud (king of the realm)’; ‘permeable membrane’; ‘where witches hide & deer roam’. 162 Figure 4 Nigel's mental sketch map Figure 4. First page of Nigel’s mental sketch map of ‘Mapping unknown lands’, Badminton Estate, February 2023. Labels in chronological order: ‘The ‘real’ world’; ‘Start here’; ‘Ecology + patterns’; ‘New Knowledge and awareness - leaves and branches - why this pattern’; ‘See Hear Feel’; ‘Uniqueness + influence of entities’; ‘Trees as symbolic ancestors’. 163 Figure 5 Second page of Nigel's mental sketch map Figure 5. Second page of Nigel’s mental sketch map of ‘Mapping unknown lands’, Badminton Estate, February 2023. Labels in chronological order: (Community - Resources - Knowledge - Communality’; ‘What is a wall?’; ‘Myths; politics; land ownership; what?; why?’; ‘Idea of land ownership have been naturalising’; (Fantastic Expectations Amazing Revelations); ‘The ‘real’ world’. 164 Figure 6 Paul's second mental sketch map Figure 6. Paul’s second mental sketch map of ‘Mapping unknown lands’, Badminton Estate, February 2023. 165 Figure 7 Tom's mental sketch map Figure 7. Tom’s mental sketch map of ‘Mapping unknown lands’, Badminton Estate (February 2023). Labels from bottom to top: ‘Horizon’; ‘Roots, radiating’; ‘Didmarton’; ‘Man with beard + chatting bout ado’; ‘Chat 1’; ‘xxxx chat’; ‘Chat 2 (xxxx)’; ‘Chat 3’; ‘Chat with xxxx’; ‘Chat 4 (birds)’; ‘Chat 5 (yew)’; ‘Chat with xxxx’; ‘YEW’; ‘Lunch’; ‘Chat with Bella’. ‘Boundary work: Susan Leigh Star; boundary as communication’; ‘Mindnode’; ‘Situationists — value of walking: Guy Debord; Michel De Certeau’; ‘The New Enclosure’; ‘Solar punk’. Names of those not participating in the study have been obscured. 166 Through these performances, the enclosure of land is made ‘real’ and ‘unreal’. The mental sketch maps tend to make visible how land was able to be collectively used due to the trespass, rather than encounters with performances of private property, although both are discussed across interviews. The context of the trespass and other mapping exercises informed the production of mental sketch maps, but the method was also understood as partial and processual; as a way of recalling embodied memory shaped by the form of the page as much as the trespass walk. All the participants enjoyed the practice of mental sketch mapping, for some despite their initial trepidation about where to begin on the page, and what to first represent. I think before I sat down to make the map, I didn’t have a clue what I was gonna put on it. No, that’s not true. I had a couple of ideas about what were important things that stood out. But I had no idea it would look like this. [There was t]hat lovely thing of having a blank piece of paper in front of you and feeling slightly nervous about what would end up on it. (Caroline) I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed it, because I have this thing that I’m not very good at drawing. So I was a little bit nervous beforehand, but it was explained really well it doesn’t matter what it looks like. But when I started doing it, I was like ‘oooh, this is ok, I’m enjoying this, I feel comfortable with doing what I’m doing’, and I’m really glad with what came out. So it was really quite a good experience from reinforcing that I can represent what I want to represent in that environment. (Nigel) In their paper outlining the mental sketch mapping method, Jen Jack Gieseking notes that more than two-thirds of their participants experienced drawing anxiety, which is linked to drawing in public (Gieseking 2013; Winnicott 1992). As I had prepared to accommodate this, I was also surprised by the positive experiences, not least because I personally continue to experience drawing anxiety, as I expressed in the group interview: I find scale really challenging and produces a lot of anxiety. I’m already thinking about ‘oh can I fit the whole thing in’ when I’m starting, which can be a bit of a challenge. And I’m not a good drawer. (Bella) Some participants had creative solutions to the hurdle of scale. Beth, who misplaced her mental sketch map and was unable to bring it to the interview, explained her approach: 167 Rather than visualising it like a map, I looked at it as a series of images. I think because I’m a visual thinker that’s how it translated to me. I didn’t really expect that to happen until I started drawing it and I was like ‘hang on, I can’t just have this on one page, flat, it needs to be a timeline almost’. [..] Each page was a different phase of the experience and that’s how I best saw it, rather than a flat one image. (Beth) This suggests Beth felt it was more constructive to represent the day with a more temporal focus — less of a snapshot from above as was my approach — but inviting readers to walk through the trespass with her in a storyboard format.55 While drawing anxiety has been linked to drawing in public, it also appears the mental sketch mapping exercise had the opposite effect here, with the peer-to-peer component serving to reinforce the validity of different approaches and perspectives. It was also an opportunity for collective processing and production of memory: It was really interesting to see the map of the person I was speaking to. I don’t think I added anything, but I think it sort of reinforced in me that my map was as bad as anybody else’s because it was so different, and there’s no way two people are going to respond to the task or the day in the same way, and that was really pleasing, that this person’s map was very different to mine, but it was their representation of the day, and that was like, wow, that’s great. (Nigel) The only thing it changed for me was that there was a bit that I’d forgotten that someone else had remembered. Like ‘oh I’d forgotten that bit, I’ll put that in.’ I guess because it was my own personal mental map, it didn’t really change the way I viewed the experience, it just helped me remember something else I’d forgotten. (Beth) Through productive comparison of the mental sketch maps, then, individual spatial experiences are validated within a collective experience. Further, mental sketch maps enables enrolment of shared yet differentiated spatial memories. Beth, for instance, enrolled in the authority of another trespasser’s memory, which prompted recall of her own performed relationship to land. I recall Butler’s characterisation of the feminist approach, that “my perception is finally not mine alone, 55 As she explains: “The first image was a collection of the first boundary that we passed, just after we had a conversation about ecology. And then, the trees going off the path we followed along. And then the next page, if I remember correctly, was the boulevard of trees of the avenue, with the yew tree at the end. Then the next page was the vista between the entrance house and the main mansion house with that little strip. And then the wall that we crossed through in the middle of it. And a little circle where we had our lunch. And some people running for their dog. And then the next page, after that, was the wall that we jumped back over. Then I ran out of time.” 168 and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways.” (1988 522) Once again, it is through the specific that shared meaning and solidarity is made possible, and this was reasserted in the interviews themselves. Guiding Beth, Tom and myself, Nigel traced his walk over two pages of his lined notebook. While it was not immediately clear it represented a circular route, Nigel demonstrated how his experience began and ended in the ‘real’ world, otherwise known to us as the A433: the main road that splits Didmarton village. The path is clearly defined on the page, perhaps acting as a structure from which to navigate his concepts, emotions and questions. His other landmark is the wall, referring to the brick wall we crossed through for lunch. Using the sketch map as an aide to recall his experience brought it to life, as Beth tells Nigel: This is really interesting because even though it’s your personal interpretation of it, I understand it, I remember it. Obviously I was there so that helps with understanding the story, but I can feel the narrative. (Beth) Even without her mental sketch map to hand, Beth draws on her cognitive map to interpret his mental sketch map, and in bearing witness to the trespass and the process of mental sketch mapping herself, is able to perform a collective memory of the day. The mental sketch maps therefore acted as aides for spatial memory, imbued with the production of social space. They demonstrate that both trespass and mental sketch mapping work together to reveal the performativity of property relations. For instance, Tom asked Nigel why he made the distinction between the ‘real world’ and the rest of the route: …we started our walk at a point. For me, what was physically and temporally before that was the real world, and then I was stepping out of it into some sort of alternative where I could be freer, and I could speak to interesting people, and do something different that I wouldn’t normally do. (Nigel) 169 Through such comparative work, Nigel is able to interpret his mental sketch map in new ways, and is open to understanding the shape of the path itself — a leaf-like structure — as a subconscious representation of his relationships to others, human and non-human. I like the fact that I started drawing a leaf when we started to talk about trees, and I don’t know how intentional that was but that stuck out. Somebody pointed that out to me, I didn’t consciously think about doing that. (Nigel) The mental sketch mapping method is collective and processual. Paul particularly highlighted this, having produced two mental sketch maps. He has given me permission to reproduce the second version of his mental sketch map, but the first, he shows me over Zoom, is titled ‘write yourself into the map’: referring to one of my prompts when introducing the exercise. The weakness of this initial version, Paul explains, is its lack of “feeling”. In other words, the disparate elements he put down were unable to represent his emotional experience of the day. It begins with arrows into the trespass labelled “anticipation” and “community begins”, before a set of fences, then a grouped element: a series of symbols demarcating wind, the trees, some stick figures, and trees in “alternate and opposite patterns”, representing his pattern mapping exercise. In the comparative component of the mental sketch mapping exercise, he also “copied” elements from his partner’s map, including the yew tree and a pair of wings representing “buzzards!” I realised it was a jumble of what I wanted to express. It was ok, but it wasn’t — it contained some elements of things, but it wasn’t the feeling. [Pointing to the grouped elements], that has a feeling in it, but [the labels] kinda didn’t. So I just ditched that, I’m not happy, and went with this one, and I’m really happy it’s got this stain. I don’t know why. (Paul) Devoid of any labels or property boundaries, his second map represents the group as a flow of circles, each an individual, collecting and weaving through collective activities and the pace of conversation during the trespass. Although “incomplete”, the exercises are represented as ‘phases’ of the trespass, landmarks on the page with very few external objects to enrol or situate the group throughout the day. Beginning from the north-west, the circles meet at the start of the car park, 170 afterwards “this is us leaving and walking on the road, so there’s a little bit of flux between people.” In the first circle, where our co-organiser Mark introduced the day, he notes gaps between people, signifying our relative lack of familiarity with one another. “This is us weaving, and weaving again across, and then stopping by the field corner, [in the second circle] and there’s probably a few less gaps because we’ve had time to coalesce, settle.” We split in the woods, and then come back together to share our patterns as part of Paul’s exercise. For the final circle, “there’s just one little gap now, I think. And you can probably, thinking back now, close that link entirely.” By then, “people had to just get to know each other... The fact that we got them all dancing.” I recalled an oddly enjoyable spontaneous group dance after the pattern mapping exercise, where we all shook like oak trees in the wind. Paul: Part of me couldn’t believe... standing, having a slightly out of body experience going, is this you doing this? I’ve never done that before in my life. I think partly, I was talking about the branches and this, that and the other, and somebody said something about oak, and it just popped into my head. Bella: A lot of people put it on their mental sketch maps, it was a really key part of the day. I’m glad you did do it, because it was memorable. Paul: I really valued the suggestion of representing your day, your experience — well it could be representing your life, couldn’t it — there’s something about taking the experience and doing something creative with it which embeds experience for people. And it has a big benefit. In a different way to the Know Your Rights While Trespassing workshop, Paul’s dance served to boost our confidence, bonding us as a group, but also strengthened the theme — bolstered by his mapping exercise — by positioning the body within an explicitly ecological relation. This ecological relation was, like many Right to Roam trespasses, the focus of the day for many, mainly due to Mark and Paul’s mapping exercises that encouraged individuals to attune to the land around them, and later to perform these land relations in the mental sketch maps. 171 Tom: I drew some natural objects, pinecones, the veins on the leaves. Satisfying how organised it all seems, when you look up close. It’s this thing of the natural landscape being untamed, not human, but on a small level, it’s exquisitely organised. In the same breath, we discussed how the mapping exercises enabled greater attunement to naturalisation of performances of private property. Nigel: When Paul spoke about ecology, there was a wall on the first part of the bridleway, so that was obviously planned at one point. Didn’t have much of an impact, because it looked more natural but it obviously didn’t come from nowhere. Bella: Yeah, that was my pattern — the wall — because of the brick. Beth: I’ve spent a lot of time in the Peak District and there’s a lot of drystone walls there, and it feels rugged and natural and really organic, but it’s not. The drystone walls have been made by humans, and they may have been there for a very long time so they feel like they’re part of the environment, but they’re not. Tom: They’re what we perceive as iconic English countryside, which is constructed, and so normalised. Beth: It’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’re really good for when you navigate with the walls, but it’s weird how your perception, your mind is telling you they’re natural and it’s always been there, but it hasn’t, which is weird. To question the wall was a common theme amongst mental sketch maps, with the act of trespass and the method allowing an attunement to private property relations as performed through such enrolments. On his sketch map, Nigel explicitly writes: ‘What is a wall?’ Likewise, during the pattern mapping exercise, he had asked why the branches and leaves radiate out from the centre: Obviously I kind of knew that was what they did, but my mind was thinking, ‘why is that’? Why is the distribution of the branches like it is? What is the purpose of the pattern? (Nigel) The trespass, like many Right to Roam trespasses, brought into conversation both ecological and property relations under a more general concern with reconnecting to the land, as Caroline explains: One of the things that’s important to me about all of this is about connection to the land and to nature. It just feels that runs through everything. It’s part of trying to look after and tend to the world that we live in. All this enclosure business feels like something that’s 172 manifests from capitalism and neoliberalism. I think enclosure’s historically much earlier than all of that. It probably starts with clocks ticking and industrialization, I don’t really know where they fit in on the timeline. It’s about reestablishing a relationship with the land, with the water, all of the things I said on there “birds don’t care about boundaries” — boundaries are important in one sense, but most boundaries in nature are things that can be moved between and don’t have to be so solid. (Caroline) Yet the maps were also differentiated. Paul, who has a long history of trespass and was very cognisant of the property boundaries we were crossing, chose not to perform them through his map. 4.4.3. The ‘moment’ of trespass Trespass is a performance of property relations, permeating the boundaries of walls — especially if those walls are not felicitously enrolled in other performances of private property. Perhaps it was because our trespass on the Badminton Estate was so ‘soft’, so undisciplined, that even these intentional trespassers were left uncertain when I asked them where the felt the ‘moment’ of trespass fell on the day. Their mental sketch maps are particularly helpful here, as they reveal differentiated ‘mindwalls’: paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, relations to other people, and fleeting moments that felt like the trespass we had come to perform in. Indeed, acts of trespass and the form of the mental sketch mapping method enable us to perform and make visible a heterogeneity of property relations, including private property. Nigel: This is fascinating because I don’t know. I thought I’d know, I thought it’d be obvious. And I thought it was the gate, but apparently it wasn’t the gate, so I don’t know where we started trespassing, which is interesting, because I thought I would know. Beth: I figured there’d be a sign. Nigel: Right! Beth: ‘Don’t come in, this isn’t yours’. Because what I mentioned I’d accidentally trespassed before was I found myself accidentally, in some way, ended up finding a fence and climbing a fence and on the other side of the fence was a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. So 173 that’s kind of what I expected from a trespassing situation. A big sign, a big red sign, ‘don’t come in’, but yeah, there wasn’t any of that to be sure. Tom: There was no point that felt like… I felt the same as you with that gate. But yeah. And then there are people walking around. Nigel: Exactly, I thought someone would make it obvious that this is not allowed. Contributing to these expectations of disciplining and exclusionary performances — indeed, these expectations themselves performances — were prior memories of the performativity of private property. Through trespass in a new place, then, heterogeneity is revealed, upending this expectation. Repeated trespasses across sites also contribute to this, as landowners ultimately perform property in unique ways, each exercising a slightly different rationality. On the ‘hard’ reconnaissance I conducted, employed gamekeepers and security were in force; at Badminton, I have never encountered a landowner. But what is clear from these accounts is that the most powerful performance of private property is a direct interaction with a landowner, as opposed to a wall, fence, or sign that can be transgressed. Beth: Seeing the Land Rover with the family, and I guess the way they were looking at us, like ‘these people shouldn’t be here’, and us being like, ‘We shouldn’t be here’, but still being there anyway. I guess that added to that feeling. Nigel: I guess the outside observation felt transgressive. Beth: Absolutely. Nigel: Not in a longstanding way, but I definitely did feel as though… that this was a slightly unusual situation. Beth: Obviously there was a fairly large group of us walking past, and they did not even stir, they didn’t turn around, they made every attempt to not interact with us at all, which was very weird. Nigel: I think I felt this a little bit when I was there last year. It’s so beautiful it makes me want to be there more. I guess this is part of what I was looking for from the day, but it reinforced the unfairness of, ‘this is private land’, or part of this is private land, and I thought this is the kind of place, or the place that should be open to everyone. It really brought that home when you could see the long path, the long vista, it made me think this 174 is a place I would like to be able to access and other people should be able to access, and that’s one of the things I was looking for on the day as well that reinforces the way I feel. (my emphasis) Although the trespass was ultimately on the ‘softer’ side, its intentionality still led participants to question the concentration of land ownership in England, understanding the landscape of the estate as a reflection of how felicitous performances of private property deny lawful access to land and knowledge. For Nigel, the lack of encounter with landowners caused him to perform his “mindwall” on the estate’s seemingly endless drive — with its three miles of constructed hills intentionally affecting depth of perception — and was therefore a more important landmark and signifier of trespass. I feel like we started trespassing when we crossed the road and went through that gate, but I don’t know if that’s true, that’s what it felt like. Although... I noticed there were a couple of people up ahead of us walking dogs that looked like they might be landowners. I don’t know why they looked like that, they were just quite far up ahead. But they didn’t even bat an eyelid that we were walking through the gate, they didn’t seem to care at all. There were lots of other people walking dogs along that bit, so I was like, I think we’re trespassing at the moment, but it doesn’t really feel like — no one seems to be very threatened by it. Seems to be okay. Nobody came and had a problem with it. To all intents and purposes, the only thing that made it feel like we were somewhere we maybe shouldn’t be was how long that driveway was. It was so well-managed, and how grassy, and how there was a big house at one end and a big gate at the other. (Nigel) Reflecting her conversation with Nigel, Caroline’s map represents her questioning of the seemingly endless drive — with its three miles of constructed hills intentionally affecting depth of perception — on her map. The drive extends between a gatehouse, labelled as “God’s gate”, and Badminton House, labelled as “castle on a cloud (king of the realm)”: [W]hen we were on the Duke of Beaufort’s drive, and I was taking in exactly how long it was between the front door and the gate, and that it was inconceivably long actually, it was really difficult to tell how long it was [...] it was the straightness of that driveway that made me think about Rome and Roman roads, and the patriarchy. [I]t looked like a castle in the mist in the distance that you couldn’t quite make out, and this gate, which looked like God’s gate, which I guess in a sort of Christian sense that feels quite patriarchal as well, that God would have a massive gate that he’d let you through into Heaven if you’ve been good. [laughs] (Caroline) 175 Finally, for Paul, the moment of trespass — or rather, the expression of his mindwall — also did not align with the actual property boundary he was himself aware of. As is reflected in his second mental sketch map, Paul seems particularly concerned with the embodiment of property relations, focused on the mobility of individuals within the group. Paul: I’m not sure I like mental maps, I think they’re more body maps, or psyche maps. Do you know what I mean? But you’re stuck with a name. Bella: Why body? Where do you get your mental map? Is it more body for you? Paul: I tell you what, in terms of trespassing, that happens a lot in the body. There’s a lot going on here [points to chest]. When you see the security, there’s a lot more going on in the body than the head. The head’s going, ‘Fuck I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ The body’s going... You get all the fizziness or whatever it might be. Bella: Did you mark a point on either map where you think you were trespassing? Paul: [pointing to the foot on his map] It’s my representation of a free foot, which I thought was quite a nice way of representing trespass. It was only after we went into the wood, and it was a bit like, ‘not really’, but we are [trespassing]. Somebody could come along and go ‘Excuse me, you’re in our wood and the footpath’s over here’, is what I felt they would say to us over there. While, as co-organisers, we both knew the trespass technically began once we’d stepped off the footpath into the woods, in our recollection, Paul finds it hard to articulate why he has marked the feeling of trespass where he did: It didn’t feel like when we walked into that wood, off the footpath, that... [we were trespassing.] Particularly because we had an intention, we were doing something with our bits of paper, so it just felt really justified. Maybe it felt like after we’d got together, and just started walking off through the wood, yeah — and then we were randomly going off, heading through. The intention had kind of changed, the intention was to go and explore and do something as a little community. Then after that, even though that was still there, we’d done that bit and we were just going off. (Paul) This was because Paul understood our conversations and the mapping exercises as a legitimate use. Without the discipline of private property, we were free to exercise this use. Indeed, without this purpose of the mapping ‘trespass’ being to educate and be in a collective space, more attention 176 — in the moment and in recollection — might have been given to the moment of trespass. Between weaving conversations and mapping exercises, the social fact of trespass — made possible by felicitous performances of private property — and making possible our very intentional collective activities, was actually rendered less ‘real’, less performative, because those very activities were enrolled in our collective experience. Perhaps one could claim they were distractions from the persistent reality of private property, performative because of the wider dominant property culture in England. Yet such a claim is not representative of the specific context. However transient, without the disciplining and exclusionary force of private property our use of land created collective meanings in space, performing property differently. With repeated trespasses at larger scales, this becomes more significant. I have never encountered a landowner at Badminton House. Paul’s previous memories of trespass have also informed his understanding of Right to Roam’s approach to intentional trespass. Having participated in Extinction Rebellion’s tactic of locking onto roads in the past, he says, “laying down in the road felt like a trespass. It felt like you were being told you could use this, but you can’t do this.” With Right to Roam, he explains, Sometimes it’s literally I want to go and look at that thing, for my own pleasure. There’s something in there, a political thing. It’s still exercising my felt right to go and do that. [It’s] more of an everyday act. When you go with a group of people, you have this different purpose. (Paul) Extinction Rebellion trespasses do perform property relations differently, but as a means to an end: to disrupt flows of capital. For Right to Roam, such performances are explicitly tied into wider discourses in pursuit of relational access, belonging, and the production of knowledge within enclosed space. This is an important conjunctural distinction too, as, since 2019 especially, access to information about — and research into — the climate crisis is ubiquitous, relative to the English land question. Its use of trespass is strategic and proportional — one purpose of Right to Roam’s intentional trespass is collective education, practiced through bringing together individuals within 177 local or everyday and national or mass trespasses. Enrolled in discourses about the politics of land in England, then, the scale of the trespass matters, alongside its intention, in addressing the ‘mindwall’, in revealing the performativity of property. 4.4.4. The scale of trespass The scale and intention of an intentional trespass therefore impacts its felicity. In other words, part of what makes a trespass feel ‘soft’ is the number of people who participate in it, as Tom and Nigel indicate. Tom: Previously when I’ve been trespassing I’ve been on my own, and you definitely don’t feel nearly as protected or safe as when you’re surrounded by lots of people. I think in the back of my head, if we’re confronted I’m sure someone more intelligent than me will be able to come up with something. Nigel: If it’s just me, I’ve got to think about how I’ve got to interact with a landowner if it comes to that. I think my confidence in being in that space was definitely raised because we were in a group, definitely. Tom: I think also everyone very quickly, everyone seemed very responsible, which means when you are doing something that can be a bit politically sensitive, you want to know the people around you are people you can rely on to not be dickheads essentially. I immediately got that feeling that it just diffuses any sort of worry because you know that everyone just handled the situation calmly, backed each other up. We weren’t there to break anything, leave litter, or do anything like that. We were just having some lunch. Bella: Is there anything you can pinpoint about the vibe of the group that made you feel that way? Beth: I think doing the oak tree dance together [all laugh] eased the tension a little bit. Like, oh yeah, these are all people I can vibe with, if we can do an oak tree dance together. The collective experience of trespass is validating, in a way that even solo uses of public rights of way may not be able to replicate. This is an argument made by the Right to Roam campaign for a comprehensive right to roam, which would enable greater sense of belonging and inclusion in the countryside. 178 Beth: I’ve been in situations where I’ve been following a public footpath and I’m exactly well within my right to be there, but because it passes through a farm or nearby a farm, the farmer’s there and is in his tractor, I’m like ‘ahhh I feel like I shouldn’t be here’. Tom: I’ve felt more uncomfortable on footpaths than trespassing. If they’re not maintained, if it’s going through the middle of a field, as footpaths often do, farmers put their crops through it and you’re walking the footpath, suddenly you feel like you’re doing something wrong. I don’t want to go stamping on a farmer’s crops. Sometimes I will just go around a field as a very minor act of trespass. It’s very frustrating, I don’t wanna be trespassing. It will make me feel uneasy, especially in farmers’ places as well, for some reason I feel bad about it. Or maybe I’m more scared of the farmer as an idea. But sometimes you’ve got to when they’re not maintaining the footpath. I went on a walk last month and I wanted to take this footpath but the gate was covered in brambles, barely used, so already I’m having to scrabble amongst the stuff and on the gate it’s like ‘Dogs are guarding this land’ and stuff like that. When Nigel cycled through Badminton Estate last summer as part of a cycling event, legally using a public right of way, he felt more ‘out of place’ than at the mapping trespass (Cresswell 1992). This indicates his value in using trespass to confront the dominant property culture in England: that of exclusion. I can’t remember exactly [where I was] but I was saying to [Mark], it definitely felt other when I was there. Even though it’s a road and it was fine to be there, it felt ‘I’m cycling through a big country estate, and this is not a normal place I would go’, so that was quite interesting, but I didn’t really think a lot about it. Bella: Did that feel the same way on Sunday, or a bit different? Nigel: I think a little bit different, because when I was on my bike I was on my own, and this was in a group. Even though I was on the road, I felt more confident in the group — maybe that’s just a personal thing — it even felt a little bit less other, even though we were othering more on Sunday than it did when I was there on my own. I don’t know why. It was just an odder experience when I was on my own on the bike. Perhaps the most significant finding from using this method to examine acts of intentional trespass, then, is the treatment of interactions with fellow ‘trespassers’ as landmarks across the mental sketch maps. The collective experience, including conversation and peer-to-peer education, organises the participants’ memories of the day more than performances of private property. The Right to Roam campaign, in enrolling both discursive interventions in the English land question 179 and organising mass trespasses, has contributed to a new culture of belonging in land, despite the enclosure of customary practice. Indeed, trespasses become spaces for peer-to-peer education and engagement with issues of ownership, access, use and rights. Tom’s more perspectival sketch map includes book recommendations and numbered conversations, which he stopped doing eventually: “I think I forgot how many chats we had.” For Nigel, these conversations with others were equally as important as the route itself: “that’s how it’s represented in my mind, so I combined it with things we discussed.” Using the conversations as landmarks, it was possible for him to recall districts in his cognitive map: “I started off and it soon turned into ‘oh we spoke about that’ or ‘that was what that area is’.” Nigel: I would hesitate to give it to someone else, only because it was there for me to… Tom: You could still explain all the features. Nigel: Yes you’re right. From a mapping point of view, maybe I wouldn’t say ‘hey, try to navigate like this’, but you’re right, it’s the different stages of what we did. Therefore the conversations enable recall of regions within the enclosed land, an indicator of their significance for participants in trespass. For each participant, these are situated within a broader set of relationships to nodes, edges, paths and other landmarks. Being guided through Caroline’s map, I was curious about her label reading ‘all the places we didn’t go’, wondering if she was considering the concept of terra incognita — that the area we were able to survey through trespass felt delimited by the extent of the large estate, and trespass brought attention to the concentration of land ownership. At least this was my experience. But for Caroline, her ability to navigate was constrained by her involvement in group conversation: Bella: Do you feel like over the course of the day — maybe it’s sort of a straightforward question in some ways — do you feel like that walk gave you a sense of how to navigate around the place? 180 Caroline: D’you know, I hadn’t thought about that. There would be some bits I would be able to navigate because I was paying more attention to the surroundings, but bits where I was lost in conversation I might not be able to navigate so much. I mean, we got lost trying to get from the pub to the car park again afterwards. This suggests that Caroline’s cognitive map still relied on landmarks and edges to attune to the surroundings, but that conversations were the important landmarks in her memory of the day. At times, her focus was less navigating terra incognita of place, but of her knowledge of land politics, specifically folk history and mythology, enabled by the collective social experience afforded by trespass. That bit where it says “legends, tales, stories cannot all be told by history” — that’s because I had a conversation with someone [...] who has a degree in folklore. I was asking him a bit about Arthurian legend, because I’m fascinated by it. (Caroline) The practice of mental sketch mapping experiences of trespass, I posit, offers a further enrolment of heterogeneous property relations performed through what is ultimately an act of research into enclosed space. In the next and final section, I will show that mental sketch mapping of one’s everyday property relations engages both the cognitive map and multiscalar abstractions of capitalist political economy, which are both performed and remembered. 4.4.5. Tracing terra incognita in the English land question In this section, I demonstrate how acts of intentional trespass and mental sketch mapping together enable us to understand the terra incognita of both enclosed land and folk, tacit or customary knowledge enclosed to us through the enclosure and commodification of land. I explore the reasons why the participants trespass, bridging the individual, local, national and international scales, and the ways in which they have received education about the enclosure of land. These illustrate the efficacy of Right to Roam’s answer to the English land question in 2023, just as it was developing 181 a national platform, in part due to the ongoing attempt to enclose the right to wild camp on Dartmoor. Bella: What does the act of trespass give to you? What benefit do you gain from accessing private land? Beth: A sense of agency, I guess. I can be here, even though someone’s telling me not to be, I can. Nigel: 100% agree with that. Tom: For me it’s really often practical, in the sense that I want to go on a random walk, and not go on some massive road, and that’s actually often not achievable, especially without a car. If there aren’t public transport links around the walk, then I often find you need to do a bit of trespassing here or there, whether that’s a couple of fields to connect to footpaths, or a big one. I’ve spent so long walking along the sides of big roads, and it’s just horrible. The other one is because of some of the longer walks I’ve done, hiking and camping, it’s a lot easier because you can’t walk an extra five miles at the end of your day to get to a proper campsite, frequently it’s just easier. Nigel: [It gives me] more of a view into, more of an understanding into private property, private land, and what that means. To focus my thoughts on ‘why am I here?’ Part of the reason I’m here is because I want to understand more about land justice and land injustice. The physical act of the trespass focused me a little bit on that. That’s part of the deal for me as well. Whether it be a sense of agency in overcoming the mindwall; a pragmatic response to the impracticalities of England’s access regime; space to consider the land question, trespass confronts the disciplining and exclusionary culture of private property culture in England. For Caroline, acts of trespass make visible local acts of “micro-enclosure”: People have come up with an idea about how to start a conversation about that, and that’s why it feels like a good idea to [trespass]. It also feels important to me because I see our rights and access to land in England getting smaller and smaller, and in ways that people often aren’t aware of, and the stuff around micro-enclosures, all of this stuff that happens all the time. Sometimes when there’s something to focus on it’s easier to take action over it. 182 Not only do repeated, localised acts of trespass demonstrate the piecemeal nature of enclosure, but how they can reveal a larger narrative about the everyday consequences of life under rentier capitalism and social alienation (Christophers 2020). On the one hand, it feels just like going on a walk anywhere else, and on the other hand, because you’re also doing it with a group of people you’re not necessarily doing it on your own. There’s some sense of solidarity in that, which is really important to me, because in our society you can feel isolated really easily. I have to rent from a landlord, and I’m stuck with that, I think, I think I’m probably stuck in that situation. […] I’m interested in the commons, and what it is to share, participate, come into community, and life not having to be about who owns what. How we can share resources is absolutely fundamental to how we go forward living on a planet that we’re managing to destroy. (Caroline) For Nigel, trespass is simultaneously a space to not only to question the wall, access regimes, or the concentration of land ownership, but to explore British/English national identity, as Right to Roam have also done in their pursuit of a ‘New English Countryside’. In the past, Nigel was ill at ease with his national identity, but Right to Roam have provided a language to rethink his belonging to land: I thought about it in an exclusive way, I’m now thinking about it in an inclusive way, of Englishness and Britishness is or can be or should be incredibly inclusive, because of all the different communities that are in this space. I’m not saying, or maybe I am saying we should try to recapture something about England or Britain which has been lost in the modern age. If we are thinking about how the commons has been taken away, is the dream to reestablish the commons? Maybe it is for some people, maybe it isn’t, but that’s really interesting because it brings out a lot of different realities for a lot of different people. It links back to how in 2023, lots of people in Bristol don’t access nature but should. It would help a hell of a lot of people if kids from Hartcliffe and Withy Wood went to Leigh Woods [a National Trust property] and found out what it was like there. To be able to relate to land differently, even from his privileged access through trespass, enables Nigel to more easily conceive of how property and broader cultural forms can be performed differently in contemporary England. Sitting with the unease of claims to ‘nostalgia’ for the commons prior to parliamentary enclosure, Nigel suggests that these histories enable possibility, 183 or at least, greater opportunities to push for access. For Beth, this unease with Britishness stems from the construction of national identity in relation to the British Empire: I’ve always been anti-British I guess, but I think more recently I’ve been trying to connect more with the natural landscape, which is English soil I suppose. I’ve never lived anywhere else, I’ve always lived in England. I’ve always been fairly connected to nature but I think I’m trying to become more at one with the natural cycles around us. I’m not necessarily proud to be British because of the Empire, and the colonial past — obviously I’m not proud of that. But I’m proud to live specifically here, on this chunk of land, that is England. I’m trying to be more connected to that because it’s where I came from, it’s where I’m gonna end up in the ground one day, you know? Anything like trespassing, as a form of activism, will help us regain that public land we need to feel British. To feel connected to the land, as you’re researching, all kinds of activism are necessary. (Beth) Participants were engaging with their land relations by traversing individual, local, national and international scales, indicating that the English land question — and its attunement to the specificity of property culture across these scales — is constructed through multiscalar relations and comparative work. Tom’s interest in land relations stemmed not only from his rural upbringing in Somerset and his adult life in London, but through watching “lots of videos about the Pacific Crest Trail in America” where national parks are publicly owned and enable greater recreational access: It definitely led me to wanting to sort of replicate it here a little bit. I did the South Downs Way and stuff like that in little bits. And then I read Nick Hayes’ Book of Trespass as most of us have, not all of us, obviously. I think that is what definitely twigged it as a political thing, really highlighting some of the injustices. (Tom) It is through these injustices that Tom feels legitimate in his performance of trespass. In exploring the English land question, he has increasingly advanced positions that compare access regimes and unsettle English property culture as it stands, as informed by Right to Roam. Whenever [...] I’d argue with some people about land access and stuff, I always think when people are dismissive of it, ‘You wouldn’t want someone camping in your back garden’, the classic thing, I always see it as a hopeful positive thing. Why would you not want to walk around more places? I can’t get my head around it. ‘I don’t want to because it’s their right.’ It’s such an odd thing. Especially when I was last year cycling in Denmark and Sweden and Norway, especially Sweden and Norway, they really go on about how amazing 184 their right to roam is. And it is amazing. And they’re really proud of it, and it really feels like at least as a tourist there — I don’t know about their perspective — but for us it feels like a really big freedom that you can go and camp anywhere with a few quite good restrictions and certain responsibilities. If we had something like that, here, it would be something you — I’d feel really proud about that if in Britain — like in Scotland, we often forget, ‘no we could never do that here’. Part of Britain does include the right to roam, and it’s not like the whole of Scotland is covered in trash, at all. It’s seen as a place that’s great for walking and hiking, and I think the same could be achieved here. (Tom) Tom makes sense of relational access through this international perspective, but also his own mobility from locality to locality. His move from London back to Somerset — being proximate to home — gave him a fresh perspective on access, and the need to trespass to know and feel belonging in your local area: You’re very often having to go on roads. They’re small rural roads, but still, it’s silly, there’s no reason to when there’s so much countryside you could walk around and stuff. So yeah, I just did a lot of walks around the area, exploring new places really near to where I lived for so long and really enjoying that. (Tom) Right to Roam activities encourage participants to challenge their mindwall across these different scales, offering confident trespassers the capacity to explore how they use space and access their rights in an everyday capacity. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the campaign has facilitated this work through both organised trespasses and discursive contributions, including, as Tom says, The Book of Trespass. Having asked why participants were drawn to trespass, I also wanted to get a sense of how the participants define enclosure, and whether they’d received institutional or informal education on the subject. At the time of interview, Caroline was reading The Book of Trespass, and says she had not encountered histories of the English enclosure movement and the subsequent development of capitalist property regimes in institutional settings: Definitely didn’t learn about it at school. It’s the sort of thing I’ve picked up very recently. In fact, that’s a really interesting question, because why don’t we learn about that at school? I feel like it’s been dripped, dripped in over the past few years. I was aware — yeah I don’t know — in conversation, in reading little pieces and articles about it, and then actually the Right to Roam group getting set up. (Caroline) 185 Tom, who has an undergraduate degree in history, explained that he associates enclosure with “the enclosure of the commons… [and] with hedges in particular.” During his degree, he had done quite a lot of medieval history, lots of little diagrams with how fields were divided into little chunks and you don’t get hedges, really, going right back. And the political side of it, which is really the defining land and putting into boundaries and territories so it can be controlled and used for money. I think it all feels quite linked. I never really thought of enclosure in a contemporary, modern sense. For me, it’s a historic term that happened before. I can’t remember if we learned about it at school or not. I feel like I must have learned it from somewhere. I can’t remember when I learned it. Maybe we did learn about it in school? Who knows. But I didn’t learn it at undergrad nor were there any topics that focused around it. The lack of formal education around the English enclosure movement across generations reflects the decline of the English land question, but also speaks to the significance of (and associated responsibility taken on by) the Right to Roam campaign’s discursive contributions. The space of trespass is a particularly important environment for unsettling property norms. As Nigel explains, prior to engaging with the campaign, I’ve always thought the land beyond the wall is in private ownership, and I can’t access that because I don’t own that land. So it was just a kind of thing that I knew but I didn’t think about it, if that makes sense. You can know something and not think about it at the same time. It was just kind of ‘private land is private land’, but now I’m thinking what is a wall, a wall is a way to keep people out, and that’s deliberate and planned. (Nigel) Paul, the oldest participant in the study, also did not study the English enclosure movement during his school years. But he is familiar with John Clare’s “expression of loss” over the enclosures, and has “a strong image of the rage of these people”: There’s something in here about how the history we’ve been told, the Norman system, the feudal system, and that’s how we lived, lords of the manor, is bullshit. Because outside of the manorial system there were also huge tracts of [common] land. [...] We are a deeply traumatised nation, the English. All of our tangible folk history has been stolen and reworked, pretty much crushed. (Paul) 186 For him, folk memory, knowledge and culture act as important avenues for engaging with histories of enclosure, while acts of trespass operate as spaces of dissemination and identity formation, new memories of alternatives instituted through practice: Hope is in seeing 25 people dancing in the woods. Hope is a splay of 100 of mind maps. That represents hope, because that represents me. Hope and community are really closed tied together. Community is going through common and shared experience, at its basic level. The moment you share something with someone that has meaning, then you’re in community with that person and always will be. Yeah, we jumped that fence together. We’re the people that did that fence jumping. (Paul) While each participant demonstrated gaps in their knowledge about the English enclosure movement and the development of private property regimes, our conversations demonstrated the efficacy of Right to Roam’s multiscalar interventions in the English land question. In February 2023, its national platform was emerging as a mainstay in this narrow and neglected arena of political discourse, and so these responses should be understood within this context. More work is to be done, but, at least for these participants, the memory of this trespass remains in their mental sketch maps as well as their subsequent practice of trespass. Trespass and mental sketch mapping therefore have the potential to work together to reveal terra incognita on the map; in our knowledge of land ownership and use in Britain; and collective memory of enclosure. Perhaps mental sketch mapping, as a partial, processual and performative practice that traces terra incognita, has the potential to shape a new memory culture around common rights in England. 4.5. Towards memory work Through trespass, it is possible to trace individual and collective terra incognita, demarcated by what Right to Roam has called a “psychological barrier”, and therefore resignify meanings in space through collective embodied practice. In doing so, participants in intentional trespass perform a heterogeneity of property relations made legible through memory of customary 187 right — despite exclusionary and disciplinary performances of private property. They also show the efficacy of Right to Roam’s discursive work, as discussed in the previous chapter, at an early stage in the campaign. Combining the methods of trespass and mental sketch mapping, I have here made significant and original contributions. The ‘moment’ of trespass appears elusive and differentiated, with the collective experience of trespass serving as a space for engagement in the English land question. I have discussed why the size and focus of the trespass matters for trespassers as they reveal the performativity of property, operating across scales: between their cognitive map of their ‘psychological barrier’, the group experience, and property culture at the national and international scale. Both the act of trespass and making the mental sketch maps perform a heterogeneity of relations beyond the ownership model, even within the enclosed space, literally illustrating that enclosure is made real or “unreal”. Acts of trespass alter our cognitive map, while the production and interpretation of mental sketch maps represent, resignify and perform those acts. In drawing on memories of the individual within a collective social world, it speaks to a collective loss of memory over time and beyond the lifetime of the individual, who is still implicated in its effects: this is the work of collective memory, intervening in epistemic enclosure. There is need for further work, particularly in comparisons between access regimes, revealing a significant terra incognita within the English land question. However, mental sketch mapping offers a way to archive acts of trespass. If understood and deployed as an enrolment, amongst many other tactics, performances of property that question private property or demonstrate the heterogeneity of our land relations can constitute an intervention in epistemic enclosure. 188 Chapter 5: Conclusion When I started this project, I was curious about my profound lack of knowledge about the English land question; disoriented by the terra incognita in my history of England. Brett Christophers’ observations in The New Enclosure — of the decline of scholarly and political attention to the land in Britain since the 1970s, and the lack of coordinated extra-local campaigning against the commodification of land — only furthered my concerns. But since 2018, I find there is hope in England, in part due to the emergence of broad-based campaigning and contributions to mass public education around the English land question. Yet in the context of its significant breadth and decline, there is much more work to be done. Tracing my terra incognita through trespass and mental sketch mapping, I have entered into dialogue with many others seeking answers. In this thesis, I demonstrate that together these reveal constraints to the production of knowledge within and about enclosed land; revealing how performances of private property have disciplined and excluded uses of land over time and with amnesic force. Like acts of trespass, the practice of mental sketch mapping attunes us to the ways we perform property, archiving a heterogeneity of relations. These methods prove useful to a broader project of accountability, especially in a context where the land question is constrained, and help address a culture of disconnection from land fostered by the proliferation of individual private property logics. Over the past three years, I have witnessed how the Right to Roam campaign and its constituent organisers have forwarded the land question in England. Through their political interventions, campaign work and scholarship, they have sought to increase public understanding of the politics of land, and therefore the scope for land reforms today, including a comprehensive right to roam over England and Wales. They have not only highlighted overlapping issues of 189 discourses and debates concerning land ownership, distribution, use and rights, but through mass trespass, created spaces for public discussion. However, there is much more work to be done. In this thesis, I show how members of the national campaign are themselves cognisant of this, articulating Right to Roam as a relational rather than recreational access campaign. While it identifies as a ‘single issue campaign’, this undermines its contributions to broadening the land question, and how it has enrolled a range of issues to make its case for reform. From its outset, Right to Roam has fostered a culture of ongoing responsibility to and belonging in land, culminating in the project of Wild Service. Discursively, it recognises a default of inclusion through a Right to Roam Act is a crucial piece of engaging with the implications of internal and colonial forms of dispossession today, as Nadia Shaikh has discussed with the impacts on diasporic communities in contemporary Britain. The framework of relational access also means we have responsibilities to one another, cultivated through the land relation. Through a performative analysis of property relations at the scale of the individual, local and national politics, and the infrastructure of knowledge production — the ‘organised forgettings’ of title by registration, surveying, and laws of trespass — I have demonstrated the decline of the land question and its breadth and variety across geographies and social groups. How the land question is defined matters, and indeed through omissions we can understand the ways it remains constrained today, and the basis of these constraints in historical processes. For instance, at various points, campaign members have made reference to the ways Gypsy, Traveller and Romani communities have experienced marginalisation and been subject to dispossession under laws of trespass. They have also made reference to the entanglement of those dispossessed in England and in British colonies. These groups are particularly important in understanding the shape of the English land question, and an international scale enables a more granular analysis of its decline 190 through shared yet differentiated ‘organised forgettings’. To recognise epistemic enclosure in England requires a comparative approach to the land question, that performs a heterogeneity of possible land relations through historical narratives. Those subject to dispossession, whether they be nomadic communities in Britain criminalised under laws of trespass, or Palestinians subject to a legal system constructed under the British Mandate, represent the persistence of memory and heterogeneous property relations in spite and refusal of performances of (colonial) private property. Their omission from strategies and tactics to broaden the English land question represents a missed opportunity for enrolment, to stabilise the decommodification of land and the persistence of customary land relations everywhere. Their ongoing struggle means we need to go further than what the campaign and indeed what this thesis can hold. Whose use of land matters? Whose memories matter? These questions are pertinent in any attempt to redefine the English land question today. While I have discussed critical contributions to the English land question, we must find ways to broaden it further, despite institutional constraints. Indeed, like land registration infrastructure, when we push those constraints, they are revealed, including the co-constitutive relationship between property regimes in England and beyond. Rather than a dilution of the English land question, its breadth can be acknowledged and addressed. Moving forward, it is critical that contributions to land reform at the scales heretofore discussed engage with the breadth and decline of the English land question, beginning from its peak in the 1840s and 1870s. That engagement must also include the longer process of epistemic enclosure, which has denigrated, marginalised, and obfuscated a heterogeneity of land relations — maintained in customary memory — in early modern England and beyond. In the 19th century, the land question was a “genuinely popular cause, something more than the pet cry of a clique of radical politicians and intellectuals” (Thompson 2010 257). The ways in which commoners 191 resisted enclosure must also be excavated. And, as Christophers notes, the entanglement of political discourse and socio-scientific scholarship on land, defunded in the 1980s, must also be brought into perspective, ideally in calls for an English Land Commission capable of coordinating public debates through research. A well-resourced, popular, coordinated and programmatic response to the English land question is required to maintain both broad and strategic scope and ends. Geographers Priti Narayan and Emily Rosenman propose a programme of public economic geography, to imagine how heterodox approaches to a geographical political economy [of land] might emerge “not just within the structures of academia, but also from outside of it”, including social movements, “who, through their everyday life-making, make, remake, articulate, and theorise the economy itself.” (2023 3) Obvious examples are Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes whose work excavating the contemporary politics of land ownership, digging through the muddy affairs of land, have been not only fruitful to the limited critical academic scholarship on land, but politically instrumental. Right to Roam has facilitated research and campaigning on the land question at multiple scales. What appears particularly generative is the campaign’s relational access approach, encouraging individuals to reconnect with land, and attune and deepen their relations. Building on the campaign’s relational access approach, as well as Christophers’ conclusions, I suggest several steps towards broadening the English land question. Further detailed policy proposals can be found in the Land for the Many report commissioned by the Labour Party in 2019 as well as Shrubsole’s work (2019; 2024), but these contributions reflect my conclusions and concerns: 192 1. Enacting a comprehensive Right to Roam Act across England and Wales, with associated responsibilities to land akin to the Scottish Outdoor Access Code; 2. Decriminalising and protecting nomadic ways of life, currently criminalised under laws of trespass; a. Lobbying the Government to review and repeal provisions under the Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and that further constrain and criminalise the mobility of Gypsy, Traveller, and Romani communities, that were in 2024 found by the High Court to be incompatible with articles under the European Convention of Human Rights protecting the right to be free from discrimination and the right to family and private life; b. Lobbying all councils across the British Isles to implement ‘negotiated stopping’ schemes.56 These are agreements between councils, landowners and travellers that include culturally appropriate provisions to remedy inequities in health and education, and waste provisions; 3. Opening up the Land Registry of England and Wales as open data, akin to the Companies House register, without a fee for non-commercial use; 4. Requiring all land to be registered, with details of its beneficial owner, before it can receive agricultural subsidies (Powell-Smith 2019); 5. Creating Land Commissions in England and Wales capable of facilitating public debate and funding research, including into the possibilities of land reform and progressive land tax reform. There is already precedent in Scotland, established under the Land Reform 56 Find more information at negotiatedstopping.co.uk 193 (Scotland) Act 2003, which is facilitating research programming such as under the James Hutton Institute; 6. Broader resourcing for programmatic and interdisciplinary research on the pattern and politics of land across Britain and its colonial-imperial entanglements, including comparative research into: housing markets and housing experiences for greater agency and choice prioritising single homeowners and non-owners; uneven and differentiated policing under laws of trespass; and memory cultures of dispossession, especially across the British Empire, bringing into dialogue literatures on epistemicide and epistemic enclosure and specifying contexts of dispossession. 7. Reforming the national curriculum to support education in land relations, including in history, political economy, ecology and outdoor education. The recently proposed GCSE in Natural History is an orientation towards connection with the natural world, but reforms must also include dedicated programming in History, Politics, and PSHE that cover critical histories of the British Empire, the English enclosure movement, and the development of property law and markets across the British Isles; 8. Greater collaboration and coordination across campaigns and civil society groups, particularly with existing racial and housing justice campaigns, including nationwide mutual aid networks for Gypsy, Traveller, and Romani families who are subject to the discretionary power of police and landowners under laws of trespass. As I conclude, I find it instructive to reflect on my first encounter with the English land question. Around the world, the period of 2018-2019 catapulted climate issues into mainstream and alternative spaces of knowledge production and policymaking, bringing together a broad swathe 194 of issues, wide-ranging public campaigning, civil society groups, and internationalist political education. As climate, so could with land. A coordinated land justice movement could push conversations and policies around the climate-ecological crisis further. Land relations get to the heart of access to land resources, knowledge, and power. Given our everyday uses of land, and how property is performed across multiple scales, land should be at the front and centre of our attention, particularly as its concentration in the hands of a few limits collective access to land, knowledge production, and memory. Land and heterogeneous interests held in property require a broad, open, and democratic conversation. 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Posted August 4 2022. https://x.com/jm0ses/status/1555215680441663488 @jm0ses (2023) ‘While we take stock of big, new losses in Dartmoor,’ [tweet]. Twitter. Posted February 2 2023. https://x.com/jm0ses/status/1621100220883902469 @jon.moses and @right.2roam (2024) ‘@nfulife - Tom, we need to talk’ [post]. Instagram. Posted November 18 2024 https://www.instagram.com/p/DChGv3FIzXi/ @Right to Roam (2022) ‘Know your rights while trespassing!’ [post]. Facebook. Posted October 12 2022. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=129740166518858 @right.2roam (2022) ‘HANDFUL SPACES LEFT FOR OUR BRISTOL #MASSTRESPASS TOMORROW!’ [post]. Instagram. Posted July 30 2022. https://www.instagram.com/p/CgodtCGqL-N/ @right.2roam (2023) ‘SOLD OUT Nadia Shaikh from Right to Roam and Evie Muir’ [post]. Instagram. Posted April 15 2023 https://www.instagram.com/p/CrFmcDso2pB/ @right.2roam (2023) ‘Maria from Right to Roam spoke at the demonstration outside…’ [post]. Instagram. Posted September 30 2023. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxz_j9EOc3l/ 211 @right_to_roam_bristol (2023) ‘Decorating the Iron Wall of Somerset!’ [post]. Instagram. Posted December 19 2023. https://www.instagram.com/p/C1CXZm1MAHv/ 212 Appendix 1. Animals of the Land pamphlet, November 18 2023. Courtesy of Right to Roam London. Illustration by Nick Hayes 213 2. Pages of the Botany Unbound pamphlet, July 31 2022. Courtesy of Right to Roam. Illustration by Nick Hayes. 214 215 216 217 3. Handout to participants of the Know Your Rights While Trespassing Workshop in Bristol, February 2023.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Geography
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Barnes, Trevor J.
The English land question, and how trespassers map epistemic enclosure
Text