"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.

"Remembering Pau Casals" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

The first Catalan name I ever (knowingly) heard was that of Pau Casals. I was around eight years old and listening to a Monty Python comedy record.

An English mock-commentator’s voice introduced “The Sonatino in E sharp by Antonio Vivaldi to be played by Pablo Casals during his 400 foot plunge into a bucket of boiling fat.” Next was the sound of a violin soloist playing a few bars, then a long scream followed by the sound you’d expect of someone falling through the air into a container of liquid.

This was very funny as a kid but, in fact, Casals was mainly a cello player and so much of this man’s life, his beliefs and practices, make Monty Python’s comedy sketches seem tame and dull in comparison.

Pau Casal’s mother Pilar (who was originally from Puerto Rico) had brought him up to treat everyone as an equal. He claims she openly breastfed his baby brother in front of the Spanish infanta (the sister of the king) on their first day at the royal palace in Madrid. The young cellist had gone there to audition for a scholarship from the queen but it turned out to be barely enough for the family of four to live on.

Fluent in seven languages, Casals became a public friend to many well-known figures in the arts, including Colonel George Picart, a hero of the infamous, anti-semitic Dreyfus case in Paris at the turn of the century.

Casals was full of contradictions, too. Adventurous by nature, he was also a creature of habit. He started more than 80 years of his life every day playing two preludes and fugues by Bach but somehow found new vitality in himself and the music every time he did so.

Rightly though, it is his musical genius that he is still remembered for.

His belief that intuition or instinct is the most important factor in the creation and performance of music was not then a popular opinion. He was also controversial in his development of radical methods of using his main instrument but understood the fundamental importance of “playing songs in the language of everyone.”

Listening to his interpretation of the old Catalan folk song (Casals says it is actually a Christmas carol) ‘El Cant del Ocells’, or Song of the Birds, brought tears flooding into my eyes and tugged at my heart strings in the first handful of notes he played. He seems to have the ability to drag you under the waves for a few wrenching seconds then within a few beats, thrust you up, blinking hard into the warmth of the sun.

My only criticism of this extraordinary man (who was also an accomplished orchestra conductor) is his mental and emotional blindspot towards the monarchy. Casals called himself a life-long Republican but his continually fawning attitude towards them was at odds with his stated attitude.

While he understandably felt indebted to the Spanish royals for early opportunities in his career, it seems to me that in his autobiography ‘Joys & Sorrows’ he exaggerated the “friendship” he had with King Alfonso XIII and Queen Maria Cristina who, as his supposed “second mother”, gave him decorative honours and jewels. Casals failed to state that their riches and position came at the expense of ordinary people such as his own family.

Just like his name Pau, Casals was essentially an international man of peace. Surely, this is partly because three major wars straddled his life, the same way he straddled the cello. He once said: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” These are still important sentiments today, almost half a century after his death.

[THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN CATALONIA TODAY MAGAZINE,MARCH 2020.]

"The giving game" -- My latest opinion article for Catalonia Today magazine

[Mick Jagger. Photo: EFE]

One day near the start of autumn I was watching that uniquely ex-British empire sport of cricket on TV. England were playing India somewhere in the UK and the equally unique face of Rolling Stones front-man Mick Jagger appeared on my screen.

He was shown drinking a long glass of sparkling wine, and was mixing with expensively dressed men and women. They were part of the crowd at this match and the TV commentators made sure to refer to him as "Sir Mick."

Apart from the polished hypocrisy of a once rebel and anti-establishment figure like Jagger allowing himself to be 'knighted' by a woman who, by simple birthright has inherited the title of The Queen of England, I was soon to learn of another example of his double-standards.

As the (Sky channel) TV commentators were quick to point out, Jagger was offering to donate money to a charity named Chance to Shine. In a sport still hugely dominated at adult level by white men from the wealthiest of private schools, this charity says that it "works to make cricket available to young people in state schools and other communities."

The catch that disturbed me was that Jagger had pledged to hand over between £10,000 and £20,000 but only each time one of the players did his definition of a good performance for their national team.

Quite possibly none of them would be able to achieve the specifics of what he was asking for. Alternatively, there was also the possibility of several of them doing well enough for Jagger to give up to about £100,000 or possibly more.

Of course, I'm not against the existence of charities and I fully acknowledge the great work that many do. I have also written about the huge moral and ethical inconsistencies that some charities operate under, as I did nine years ago in an investigative article on The Polaris Project in the USA.

My complaint is that people like Mick Jagger and other noted celebrities, while obviously giving needed funds to organisations working as NGOs, are using the act of donation as little more than an ego trip or some kind of casino-like, grown-up playtime.

If Jagger can afford to give say £100,000 to help develop young cricketers then why not just just give it? Instead he turns the whole thing into some kind of measly piece of cheap entertainment for himself and his acquaintances while they sip their costly drinks and nibble on each other's vanity.

Sitting in continental Europe watching my TV in that moment, far from the sporting action, I imagined a group of little British boys and girls being told that financial help with their cricketing passion was not possible because the money had run out.

Depending on the vagaries, luck and chance of thirteen men on a field, maybe if one or two of the cricketers had just hit the ball a metre further, their places in the Mick Jagger-sponsored program would have been guaranteed.

In the corporate boxes where Jagger was likely to be, there might have been some back-slapping, congratulating him about what a damn fine fellow he was for being so generous. Instead, I imagined Jagger chatting away to the well-heeled around him, barely watching the game itself, completely indifferent about how many kids his little scheme was going to actually touch. Or not.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2018.]

"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.