A new book by Guy Shrubsole Who owns England? sheds some light on this longstanding question. There is a familiar assumption that floats around in the cultural ether, that the C of E is a massive landowner. But it turns out not to be totally true. Roughly, the Church of England owns 0.5% of England. And given that, through the parish system, the church has a presence in every community in this country, this doesn’t sound a lot to me. Especially when compared to the aristocracy, which owns a whopping 30% of it, for instance.
What fascinated me about Shrubsole’s findings was not how much land the church owns, but how much land it has lost – and relatively recently. According to his figures, the church owned some two million acres of glebe land (an area of land within an ecclesiastical parish used to support a parish priest) in 1873. By 1976, this figure had plummeted to 111,628 acres. And Shrubsole does his best to make this sound suspicious. “The mystery of who stole the church’s land is a whodunnit worthy of a Brother Cadfael novel,” he writes. [...]
Can the church do something to restore its damaged reputation? Last month, it established a commission to address its response to the housing crisis, promising “surplus church land for affordable housing”. And there are already developments underway. At present the commissioners are seeking planning permission for 9,200 new dwellings, 2,500 of them so-called “affordable”.
No comments:
Post a Comment