"Who owns London's golf courses?"

[Beckenham Place Park, a former golf course turned into a public park by its owner, Lewisham Council.]

"Half the golf courses in Greater London are owned by councils or the Crown Estate, a new investigation by Who Owns England can reveal. 

The findings add further impetus to growing calls for golf courses and other private green spaces to be opened up to the public during the coronavirus crisis, so that there is more space to safely exercise in...

              [Golf courses (red) vs existing public parks & gardens (green) in Greater London.]

The lockdown has highlighted how access to nature is a fundamental human need – there’s mountains of evidence on the physical and mental health benefits of getting outdoors – and the fact that this is a matter of social justice: people in deprived areas have smaller gardens and less access to green space.

In the context of this emerging debate, let’s take a look at who owns London’s golf courses, and whether they could be readily persuaded to open up to a wider public.

THE OWNERS OF LONDON’S GOLF COURSES: FROM HARROW TO IMPERIAL TOBACCO

To uncover who owns London’s golf courses, I took Ordnance Survey’s Greenspace dataset, extracted just golf courses, clipped this with the GLA boundary, cleaned up a couple of errors in the dataset where polygons overlapped, and measured the area of each course. I then cross-checked the resulting 131 golf courses against Land Registry’s Corporate & Commercial dataset to uncover the owners. The full results are in this Google Spreadsheet.

Here’s the headline findings:

Golf course owners in Greater London	Acres	Percent
Corporate / private	5,122	45%
Councils	4,702	42%
Crown Estate	853	8%
Split 50/50 council & private owner	363	3%
Unknown ownership:	270	2%
Total	11,310 acres	100%

Whilst most of the corporate owners are simply fee-paying golf clubs, there are also some intriguing names, including:

• Harrow School;
• Dulwich College, who have commendably already opened up their sports fields for the public;
• Imperial Tobacco’s pension fund, owners of Selsdon Park golf course (who knew Big Tobacco cared about outdoor exercise?);
• and Du Parcq (Jersey) Ltd, owners of Brockley Hill Golf Park, registered in the offshore tax haven of Jersey.

The Crown Estate own golf courses at Hampton Court, Richmond Park, and Eltham, amongst others.

But to me the most interesting owners are the councils. Hillingdon, Enfield and Barnet are the top three London councils who own the most acres of golf course. And Bexley, Brent, Bromley, the City of London Corporation, Croydon, Ealing, Harrow, Havering, Hounslow, Kingston, Lee Valley, Lewisham, Redbridge, Richmond, Sutton, Waltham Forest – together they own thousands of acres of golf courses. They could all be opening this up immediately, if they chose to, to create more space for safer exercise. So why don’t they?

If you’d like to see this change, please sign and share my petition!"

Source here.

"Revealed: the aristocrats and City bankers who own England’s grouse moors"

"This Sunday is the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, the start of the grouse shooting season. But who are the landowners who own England’s vast grouse moors?

As Who Owns England has previously exposed, grouse moor estates cover an area of England the size of Greater London – some 550,000 acres – and are propped up by millions of pounds in public farm subsidies.

Now, for the first time, we’ve mapped the owners of around 100 grouse moor estates across England.

Even the Spectator calls owning a grouse moor “screamingly elitist” – and surprise, surprise, around half of England’s grouse moor estates turn out to be owned by the aristocracy and gentry, whilst the other half are owned by wealthy businessmen and women, City bankers, hedge fund managers, and Saudi princes.

Here’s the ten largest grouse moors by area, with their owners, and the farm subsidies their estates received from the taxpayer in 2016:

Grouse Moor Estate	Acreage	Farm subsidies (2016)	Owner
Raby Estate	30,000	£683,579	Lord Barnard
Gunnerside Estate	26,020	£100,632	Robert Warren Miller, businessman. Estate registered offshore
East Allenheads & Muggleswick	26,000	£145,288	Jeremy Herrmann, hedge fund manager
Abbeystead Estate	23,000	£57,228	Duke of Westminster
Wemmergill Estate	15,676	£272,664	Michael Cannon, businessman
Lilburn Estate	14,678	£1,550,699	Duncan Davidson, founder of Persimmon Homes
Bolton Abbey Estate	13,500	£139,708	Duke of Devonshire
Bollihope Estate	12,600	None registered	Sheikh of Dubai
Linhope Estate	12,000	Not known	Duke of Northumberland
Strathmore English Estates	11,169	£279,609	Earl of Strathmore
Totals	184,643 acres	£3,229,407

You can read more about other grouse moor owners and the investigation methodology later in this blog post.

THE DESTRUCTIVE IMPACT OF GROUSE MOORS:

The fact that a tiny elite owns England’s grouse moor estates matters, because of the disproportionately large environmental impact of managing grouse moors. Grouse moor gamekeepers are responsible for the illegal persecution of hen harriers (we should have 300 pairs in the English uplands – it fell to 4 pairs in 2017), and for wiping out huge numbers of foxes, stoats and other natural predators of grouse.

Moreover, the slash-and-burn practices used to maintain grouse moors – burning heather, often on rare blanket bog – have been shown to dry out and degrade peat soils.  This releases soil carbon, adding to global warming, and reducing the resilience of our uplands to the impacts of climate change: desiccated bogs mean worse wildfires when it’s hot (like Saddleworth Moor) and more flooding when it rains (like the flash floods that washed off Walshaw Moor in winter 2015, deluging Hebden Bridge). It also makes grouse moors look like the surface of the moon, as I found on a visit to one in the Peak District..."

Read more from source here.

"Who owns England [and Wales]?"

From this astonishing website which uncovers exactly why the "housing shortage" exists in the UK...

"Together, UK corporate bodies and overseas companies own around 13 million acres of land – roughly a third of England and Wales.

But who owns the remaining two-thirds? Aristocratic families and trusts? Farmers? Charities? Householders? It’s clear we still have much work to do…"

Interactive map also here.