Who Owns England?
map.whoownsengland.org
map.whoownsengland.org
This seems really strange to me. Why should this be the case?
Some interesting information at their blog https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-... https://whoownsengland.org/2016/11/10/why-we-must-open-up-th...
"Corporations are people" if the corporation is the State, it seems.
Michael Badnarik gave a good presentation on the subject:
In Spanish there's that "real" too (as in "derechos reales", "real estate taxes"), that makes it third meaning after "real" and "royal".
This explanation makes more sense to me intuitively, as there is a lot of material stuff that is not "real estate", in fact majority of stuff that is material is not real estate.
The funny thing about the link you share is that the two comments that offer the real answer are the least voted.
They explain why actions were called in rem (a demand related to possesions as opposed to in personam) and that real estate is refered to goods that you can't move, as opposed to furniture. Actually in Spanish real estate is "inmueble" while furniture is "mueble".
Let's not forget that for land in many countries, if a squatter uses your lad for xx years without being challenged, it is theirs. So it's recognized as different.
"With the exception of oil, gas, coal, gold and silver, the state does not own mineral rights in the UK. Generally minerals are held in private ownership, and information on mineral rights, where available, is held by the Land Registry together with details of land surface ownership."
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/planning/legislation/minera...
For example the City of London existed before the crown of England, never mind the union we know as UK...
- before the Crown, there were several crowns. England was composed of a handful of Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms
- before that, it had an emperor. The Roman emperor.
- parts were ruled by the Danish (the Danelaw) and parts were ruled by the Saxons
- with regards to the UK, the political union is much younger than the union of crowns. The personal union was a Scottish king inheriting the English throne. The political union was the English parliament strong arming the Scottish.
- there was once a kingdom of Ireland until England had its way.
There was, but its king was the King of England (and later of Great Britain), and its parliament was subjugated to the parliament at Westminster, which could veto its acts and legislate directly for Ireland. It saw a brief period of autonomy towards the end of the eighteenth century, when its relationship with Britain became more akin to that between England and Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Act of Union; but after the United Irishmen revolt, Britain convinced the Parliament of Ireland, at least partly through bribery of its members, to abolish itself, and Ireland was formally absorbed into the UK.
Before the Kingdom of Ireland was the Lordship of Ireland, which was much the same, but with the King of England as Lord (rather than King) of Ireland, a title granted in 1154 by the first and only English pope, Adrian IV. (Henry VIII had himself declared King of Ireland after his breach with Rome, to quash the belief that the Pope was Ireland's ultimate sovereign.)
Before the Lordship there was a whole mass of kingdoms and sub-kingdoms (including the Kingdom of Dublin mentioned by ptaipale in a sibling to this comment), sometimes united under a High King, the most famous possibly being Brian Boru.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saxon_Stories
I don't know how historically accurate they are, but they're relatively fast paced, fun to read and take place around the time where there were several kingdoms.
It lasted from 853 AD to 1171 when the Norman conquest finished it off -- in fact, this is a longer time than what the Acts of Union of England and Scotland have lasted so far.
Source: http://www.walesher1974.org/her/groups/GAT/media/GAT_Reports..., p. 121.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-... 'The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” ...Relationships with the rich and famous were essential in Vatopaidi’s pursuit of government grants and reparations for sackings, but also for the third prong of its new management’s strategy: real estate. By far the smartest thing Father Ephraim had done was go rummaging around in an old tower where they kept the Byzantine manuscripts, untouched for decades. Over the centuries Byzantine emperors and other rulers had deeded to Vatopaidi various tracts of land, mainly in modern-day Greece and Turkey. In the years before Ephraim arrived, the Greek government had clawed back much of this property, but there remained a title, bestowed in the 14th century by Emperor John V Palaiologos, to a lake in northern Greece. By the time Ephraim discovered the deed to the lake in Vatopaidi’s vaults, it had been designated a nature preserve by the Greek government. Then, in 1998, suddenly it wasn’t: someone had allowed the designation to lapse. Shortly thereafter, the monks were granted full title to the lake.' ...which they exchanged for government land at inflated value and then got into the bond market.
If you want a deep dive into Conspiracy Theory Territory, google for "Crown Temple" and read about how the "Crown Temple" controls the (regular) Crown and how it secretly owns the United States of America.
I'm glad someone is finally doing it. The Tories have a pretty good track record on digital government (the gov.uk website is also great). Unfortunately that was the only clearly good thing I found in the manifesto.
The current legislation is already supposed to make it impossible to own a company without being listed as a beneficial owner. It seems that in reality Companies House can sometimes be unexpectedly lax about forcing foreign-owned companies to comply with the law.
> This seems really strange to me. Why should this be the case?
It's not. It's a clickbait title. There is a land registry, and you can look at it to find out who owns land.
Cite opposition to attempts to reform that system for a better one (that can be polled programatically for example), and then we can say that calling it "closely guarded" is accurate.
It's similar to calling the data contained in microfilm at your local library "closely-guarded". It's cumbersome to parse, yes. It's kept behind lock and guarded doors (when the library is closed), yes. But access is not reserved for those who meet security and/or idological criteral and vetting. There is no attempt to prevent the decemination of the information to others outside a vetted pool of privilaged users. What makes microfilm difficult to access is not it being closely guarded, but rather just that nobody's gone and digitized it — yet (If this is not true, then just image we're in the year 2007, or 1997). If people trying to digitize such material were hampered by active effort of the keepers of the microfilm because the said "keepers" didn't want the information available more broadly... then that would be "close-guarded". But that is not what's happening.
So yes, it's term is click bait. Or just bad, imprecise writing.
As registration was introduced (as someone explains above, England is _old_) transfers are obliged to be registered, at first it was transfers for sale, but gradually other transfers were added. It is not possible, since registration was switched on for the last of England, to transfer real property without registering, the transfer is invalid if you try.
So, if the land isn't registered, that means it hasn't been transfered since registration began. You're talking about e.g. miles of empty wilderness that are owned by some old guy somewhere. THAT sort of thing isn't secret, everybody in the area will know who owns that "Oh, that's part of Lord Smith's estate. I expect his son manages it these days, of course the son is 73 so you don't see him about".
"HM Land Registry holds records about most property or land sold in England or Wales since 1993"
I'd put that the other way around, saying the land owners have disproportionately ended up as the wealthy and powerful. The ownership of land and the huge unearned income derived from renting it to the masses looks more like cause than effect to me.
I think either they bought it from the Crown, because they were wealthy, or they were granted it from the Crown, because they were part of the elite and did something for the Crown.
Since you think it was the other way around, how do you explain how they got the land?
There was no necessity to be wealthy first (although as you point out, this was often the case). Trouble is, if they were wealthy to start with, how did this happen? It just pushes the same question a bit further back. I suspect that in most cases, there are smaller conquests of local areas by a local family who gradually expand their reach, then lend military support to the king in exchange for being left alone.
Also, without the constant income the rents provide, you would not stay wealthy for long even if you had cash to start with, which is why land is so important. Getting money via trade and industry means you have to both be good at what you do and accept a profit margin which may vary depending on market conditions. Renting out land requires no skill and is impervious to competition. Constant cash flow forever with no effort. In order to accumulate serious wealth in the age before industrialisation, there was no better way.
In Marxist economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital, and therefore of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Adam Smith's account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process, in which some workers laboured more diligently than others and gradually built up wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living wages for their labour . Karl Marx rejected this explanation as "childishness," instead stating that, in the words of David Harvey, primitive accumulation "entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatised mainstream of capital accumulation". This would be accomplished through violence, war, enslavement, and colonialism.
I don't endorse this theory but I thought it was relevant.
Thats why you choose a proper partner.
Wealth still helps a lot, obviously, but thats why things went wrong and many people married for money and not for fitting genes.
The problem with this line of argument is the land always belonged to somebody else first. The Moors took it from the Visigoths, who took it from the Roman Empire, who took it from Carthage, who took it from Celt-Iberian tribes that had been taking it from each other since time immemorial.
>>or taking it from natives of new territories (America, Africa)
Who were engaged in near constant tribal warfare against each other for the possession of territory. The Conquistadors had such an easy time toppling the Aztecs because two of their abused vassal states rose up in rebellion and joined the Spaniards (providing the bulk of Cortes' forces at one point). Africa's tribal kingdoms and regional empires show the same bloody history of conquest as any other region in the world.
Although it's certainly unsettling, one of the ever-present themes across human history is the legitimacy and endurance of conquest. Any attempt to challenge that legitimacy requires a coherent framework for dismantling the hierarchy and replacing it with a "fair" one (a fool's errand). This is precisely the task at which Marxism and its various Critical Theory descendants fail so spectacularly.
It's all well and good to say the current distribution of things is unjust and demands to be addressed. It's another thing entirely to actually do so "fairly" (and more importantly, peacefully). It seems to me far more likely that whatever agency or panel is authorized the enormous power necessary to affect such a change will inevitably abuse that power and merely replace the current hierarchy with a new one of their choosing. And the odds are that if mere government dictate could not accomplish it, they would resort to the same "violence, war, enslavement" that Marx was denouncing (i.e., conquering the conquerors). Friedrich Hayek put it this way: "Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order."
I'm reminded of the thought experiment in Rawls' Theory of Justice that he calls the "veil of ignorance"[0]. In short: before individuals enter a society they are totally blind to their own place in it (race, class, gender, wealth, etc), like a randomized spawn in a game. They are then asked to deliberate on the distribution of rights and resources before entering the society. Rawls concludes that everyone would agree on the most equitable distribution because they cannot know who they will be in this new society (e.g., a lopsided society where most people are incredibly poor or enslaved is a huge gamble to take).
What Rawls doesn't do is take things a step further and imagine what that utopian society would be like in practice. Once everyone "spawns" in and begins living (pursuing opportunities, acting out passions, planning for the future, etc) there are guaranteed to be unequal outcomes when some are more successful/economically valued/powerful/attractive/politically manipulative/etc than others. Soon enough the once-equals have established a new hierarchy, as human societies tend to do, and we're back to square one.
Marx was wrong to call Smith "childish", especially when his own ideals are so naively hopeful. Even in a hypothetical world where one could implement a completely "fair" redistribution of possessions, once people begin exercising their will and making choices, inequalities will inevitably emerge and Smith's view of original accumulation would play out.
I don't share Marx's view on the solution, but my point is that he correctly addressed the problem. All the examples you gave about previous violence in conquered territories just strengthen the point that meritocracy and wealth had nothing in common. Now, I actually believe strongly on personal merit and nowadays it can get you much further than before although I think we could do much better to give more similar chances to everyone at birth.
Regarding Rawls, it seems as though the point is more to avoid a situation where there is a glut of people living truly miserable lives, such as the world we live in today. Inequalities are inevitable, but if almost everyone has a tolerable standard of living and there is no major dystopic framework in place it's no longer such a huge gamble to be born in this hypothetical world. It's definitely commendable to try to reduce the spectrum of inequality, or to redesign the system so that rent-seeking behavior no longer becomes problematic.
By being given it by a state (which you have already said, in turn used force) or by forcefully taking it. It's primitive accumulation in the second instance and favouritism in the first. However both methods involve the creation of the concept of this type of property and further to take it, which requires as Proudhon put it, barbarism.
(The "glorious revolution" of 1688 contained no fighting, although it did involve foreign troops. There was a successful armed revolution in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, but this was more of a decolonisation than a class-based revolution.)
If you look at how major English land owners got started it all goes back to elites being granted land by the Crown for service.
Is this a trick? The Crown got all their land by conquest: the Roundheads, Normans, the Danes, the Romans, &c.
I'm talking about people except the Crown. 1066 and all that reset everything. Otherwise who's patronage would I be referring to?
Only if your ancestors win the battles and can stick around to defend it. Land was won and kept with blood, sweat, and tears (in that order).
And this brings us close to studies of "social mobility" (glossing over the difference between class and wealth - which - taking a long perspective - can be assumed to be roughly synonymous).
And with social mobility between generations usually fairly low in general - the next most trivially true answer is "because their ancestors were".
Attempts to trace this back to some origin myth is slightly silly but on the whole your answer to the "where did it all begin" question indicates your political colour.
If you tend to answer "Because they stole it by force" then you're probably on the left. And if you tend to answer "Because they created a strong leadership that protected a group from other groups" that places you on the right.
Of course - pure examples of bandits vs noble warrior kings are rare but I suspect there's more of the former in history than the latter. ;-)
You can try and mitigate that by gifting to your children, but the tax free limit for that is only £3k per year and is still taxed if it's given less than 7 years before you die. Not really enough to do extensive property owners much good.
E.g., the Grosvenors, who own 3% of London. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/11/inheritance-ta...
If you want to give away property, then you have to make sure you don't continue living in the property rent-free for it to count for IHT.
As others have mentioned, serious estates just use trusts etc. instead.
http://www.money.co.uk/guides/gifting-money-to-your-children...
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/11/inheritance-ta...
I think the recent changes have made it more difficult to completely avoid inheritance tax, but a proper trust setup will drastically reduce it.
Many can get tax relief as a "national heritage asset" by opening to the public [1].
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tax-relief-for-national-heritage...
There is also a registration (stamp) tax any time you want to register a property in your name, these start on properties higher than 125K GBP however you would be very hard pressed to find anything beyond a parking space or a storage lot for that low in the UK.
On average when you purchase a property you will pay about 4% of it's value in tax.
So saying that there isn't a property tax in the UK is a bit of a stretch.
This is true of property tax in the US as well. Not directly, perhaps, but renters are most definitely paying the property tax for their landlords.
One way to verify that not even landlords believe this "pass on the costs" theory is to see what they lobby for. U.K. landlords are adamant in lobbying against any attempt to convert the council-tax system into a property-tax system, and California landlords strongly lobby against any modification to Proposition 13. If it were equivalent either way with all costs just paid by the renters, landlords wouldn't care enough to lobby.
Property tax hits all landlords in an area in roughly equal measure, so it establishes a rental price floor without any of the illegal and impractical forms of collusion. Rental prices below that floor generally do not exist unless some kind of funny business is going on, because few people are willing to operate a business that continuously loses money without some kind of plan for getting it into positive cash flow.
Later on, if property taxes increase by a marginal amount, rental prices may increase by less than that marginal amount, but they will also eventually cause the cheapest rents to exit the market, as the tax increase causes them to cross the boundary of profitability, so further into the future will increase the surviving rents due to contraction in supply, and possibly increase in demand, depending on what the property taxes get spent on.
As such, if you are a land-owner in the US, and own property that rents at above-median rates, it would benefit you to lobby the local government to increase property tax rates, improve the public school system, and invest in public infrastructure. This tends to force out your cheaper competition, who might then sell out to you or convert to condominiums, and attract new tenants willing to pay higher rents. Tax increases come out of your tenants' pockets. But if you are at the cheapest end of the rent scale, you would likely prefer to lobby for zoning and occupancy restrictions, and to keep property taxes low. Your tenants have a hard limit on what they can afford to pay, and so the tax increases come straight out of your pockets. So there are valid reasons for landlords to lobby, both for and against.
If you rent via an all inclusive scheme then you are not liable for it personally.
As long as someone is paying the tax and no discounts (single occupancy, benefits etc.) are applied on the tax the council doesn't really care who and how many people live on the property.
Property tax would be taxing the landlord or at worst the leaseholder exclusively.
The amount that a person has to pay depends on the budget of the local council and the banding of the property that the person lives in.
The only real reason why this isn't a direct link is that the banding is not reassessed regularly.
I do know some people who successfully persuaded their local council to move their property to a lower-priced band based upon the alleged fall in property value..
It has advantages and disadvantages. In my city, abandoned property often gets saddled with old tax liens and cannot be given away.
Surely this means the land has a negative value, and should get a positive tax, seems silly to have liens that are > than the value of the property.
What state/country do you live in?
To put it another way, a property tax would be paid by the freeholder, not the leaseholder. This wouldn't make much of a difference for renters (as the owner would simply pass the cost on), but for owners of leasehold property it would be a stunning boon (and for freeholders who have sold the lease a disaster).
https://www.gov.uk/council-tax/second-homes-and-empty-proper...
Empty properties are not always exempted. It's up to the council. Sometimes they are, sometimes there's a discount, sometimes there's no discount, sometimes people have to pay extra for empty properties.
I guess one English equivalent is the "Council Tax".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_Tax
And there are "business rates" for commercial properties.
Now stamp duty, that is something which prevents land in the UK from being optimally utilized.
In this case, maximum utilization means maximum economic output, which is good for GDP and good for the country. It may not be the best for the local society, though. That part is hard to quantify and controversial.
Under a system of pure land value taxes, an empty lot downtown would be taxed at the same rate as the highrise next to it, and taxed much higher than an empty lot in the outskirts—a huge incentive to put that empty lot to more productive use.
The proliferation of parking lots is a regulatory/zoning issue.
If you have the capital, sitting on low value property can make you a lot of money.
Also, if you are a real estate investor, you can "launder" your profits to avoid taxes. That's why old shopping plazas will degrade until there is only a kung-fu place and a dollar store. It literally has a value sopping up real profits from thriving holdings with paper losses.
As old Marx put it, a commodity has two values. A use value, and a exchange value.
In the case of land, usage would mean building on it, farming it, or some such activity.
But even if nothing like that happens, the exchange value remains. Meaning that someone out there is willing to trade you for it.
In a discussion about problems with urban property in the US, an HN thread would decry property tax and wax on about land value tax.
The UK is a total nightmare for this and the education level is very low especially in economics so any mention of it is met with "it's me house".
There are all sorts of exemptions. A common source of complaints is that it's possible to have a huge area of Scotland as grouse moor but not pay business rates on it.
Generally, properties are assigned bands according to density/cost of providing services to an area: an area with a difficult garbage pickup route may get a higher band, or a place with more schools.
More typically, bands are allocated based on the ability of the occupiers to pay, and the funds are combined (reallocated) at the local authority level so that deprived areas can be subsidised by wealthy areas.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/understand-how-council-tax-bands...
I also think that unless some event happens that serves to dismantle (to a greater or lesser extent) the existing power structure, this will never happen.
I've always assumed that this is because those who think land is just another free market commodity (it isn't) don't realise there's anything to talk about, so they keep quiet.
However, those that understand realise they can use land to bypass the free market and get a constant flow of free money through rent. They then routinely lie about it so they get to carry on.
My hope is that new technology such as the linked map of land ownership will lower the bar to learning how land works far enough that it becomes hard to lie about it effectively.
Land is a monopoly, but most people are not even aware that economists describe it as such, let alone knowing how the monopoly works. I think once that begins to change, we will see reform. More of an education issue than anything else.
What about the money that you spent buying/restoring/maintaining land instead of doing something else?
There's also risks when renting your private property. What if they don't want to leave? You can't kick them out, you need to begin a trial and justice is very slow (it takes at least 2 years and as long as 10 years in Argentina and I've heard it's the same on most countries of the EU). And it's not like you'll get your money back (the losses of not renting that property while it was occupied plus judicial expenditures).
I agree that there are people who own lots of land and properties, but it's their right because they used their money for it, instead of doing something else.
This means that if you want to a) live walking distance from your parents (free childcare, so your partner can work and you get double income) and b) be able to commute to your place of work, there are certain number of qualifying pieces of land and no more. If someone already owns them all, you have no other choice but to buy or rent one of those. No entrepreneur can undercut high land prices with a cheaper equivalent, therefore it's a monopoly.
Yes, of course, in the limit where there is particular item for which there is no substitutes, this approaches a monopoly. Hence, certain pieces of land can roughly be described as monopolies, as can, say, the Mona Lisa. But this doesn't make it reasonable to characterize most land as a monopoly. Most land is substitutable, for most purposes and for most buyers, by different land. The unrealistic supposition that "someone already owns them all" in your hypothetical highlights this. How often can anyone say "I rented a house/apartment for which there were zero feasible alternatives from another seller"? Almost never.
I didn't explain the example I used very well. In the case you mention: renting an apartment, there are indeed always alternative locations. However, that does not mean the market is competitive. The key difference is that from your perspective, these bits of land are equivalent, but from other people's perspective, they are not. One of those locations that you may consider to be nothing special may be another person's number one choice because it's close to something they value, which you don't care about. That could be friends, family, work, amenities, businesses that your business depends on, raw materials, transport links, etc, etc. Each buyer has unique needs and each location has a unique set of things it's close to. That means that the seller/landlord does not need to bother attempting to attract your business in a competitive way as this other person for whom that location is their best option (and likely others too) will already have approached them. In effect, each unique location is an auction, with a different group of buyers interested (at different prices) each time. This only happens because land doesn't move. If it did move, then the locations would not be unique and the market would work more as you imply it would.
The outcome is that each piece of land is sold based on the highest bid offered by any buyer. A characteristic of a monopoly. This is the opposite of a free market, where things are sold as a result of the lowest price offered by any seller.
Your explanation doesn't save your example. It will always be the case that, for any given buyer in a non-commodity market, one choice is better than all the other. (If the products are not identical, one will essentially always be at least a bit better than the others for some reason.) However, this doesn't approach a monopoly except as the alternatives become arbitrarily bad in comparison (i.e., do not function as substitutes). Yes, in this limit, it's a monopoly, but this is almost never the case.
Your remaining comments imply that anything sold at auction is a monopoly and not a free market. You also incorrectly ascribe this to lack of mobility:
> In effect, each unique location is an auction, with a different group of buyers interested (at different prices) each time. This only happens because land doesn't move.
Art, used cars, items on eBay, etc., are all products that move (unlike land) yet "each...is an auction, with a different group of buyers interested (at different prices) each time". Again: the key mistake is that you are conflating all non-commodities as monopolies.
Ownership is a limited-use social contract. There's less you can do every day.
Or check out Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian? http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
Think about it: Even your perfectly legal little house, was taken by force or chance at some point back in history.
I can't really see it happening in England.
Property tax is the only way to level the playing field for everyone. If you want to hold land, you have to pay yearly for it based on it's value.
This system discourages selling/buying property since you pay taxes on the transaction. The whole framework seems to be crafted specifically to reward those who already hold land. It's very similar to the NYC taxi medallion problem.
If so that sounds terrible.
[0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-land-va...
I have no idea if this is good or bad, compared to the U.K
[1] http://www.landreport.com/americas-100-largest-landowners/
I would hardly describe the landed estates of Scotland as 'notoriously unequal'; Much of the land in England is sold as leasehold, such that your house in Lambeth will revert to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 99 years unless some legal procedure (and fee, and solicitor's consideration) is paid (usually when selling). In Scotland, the leasehold is nigh-non-existent, and the standard ownership is a freehold (the property owner own the property in perpetuity).
I think this project is to highlight the rent-seeking behaviour of the leaseholders.
That's a fallacy with an entirely-appropriate name.
Note also that Scotland contains some very large but sparsely populated single owner estates, with around 80% of the population living on a very small percentage of the land (Glasgow and Edinburgh), which may make ownership appear "unequal".
https://beta.gov.scot/publications/improving-transparency-la...
And some stats from Google:
Scotland area - 80,077 km2, Glasgow - 149.9 km2, Edinburgh - 264 km2, i.e. 0.5% (413.9km2) of area is Glasgow or Edinburgh.
Scotland population: 5,295,000, Glasgow: 598,830, Edinburgh: 495,360, i.e. 20% (1,094,190) live in either Glasgow or Edinburgh.
That is reflected in property prices too - you can buy a farm with 452 acres of land (1.8 km2) in the north of Scotland (e.g. http://search.savills.com/list#/r/detail/gbedruedr140125) for a similar price to a 300 m2 flat in central Edinburgh (e.g. http://search.savills.com/list#/r/detail/gbedscedt160229 ).
Looks fine on my Linux with latest Chrome (58.0.3029.110), with built-in (not discrete) Intel graphic card and standard drivers shipped with Linux Mint.
UMatrix/Ublock Origin can do this, not sure if it is by default though.
http://www.andywightman.com/poor-had-no-lawyers
Edit: Another book I recommend to give a taste of the kinds of stuff that went on here is "Donald McLeod's Gloomy memories in the Highlands of Scotland" - a first hand account of the Clearances:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Donald-McLeods-memories-Highlands-S...
I grew up around there, and there's always been odd stuff about the place. Like this now abandoned tower, that used to always have a military presence.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5536807,-0.9773292,3a,75y,...
Okay that may not be remarkable if you're not from East Anglia.
Who becomes the final arbitor in such cases? The cynic in me would think that there's a the-crown-gets-it fallback.
Anyway, the land in your example was not really "unowned." Rather the legal owner was different than the occupier, and turned out to be missing. I was referring more to the fact that the Crown is the ultimate legal owner of (essentially) all of the land in the UK (and Canada and other countries for that matter). Anything that does not have any other legal owner is definitely owned by the Crown. What would be called government land in the US is called Crown land in Canada (and presumably in the UK?).
Linked is some related stats: https://whoownsengland.org/2017/01/01/who-owns-england-what-... - CofE does not appear there either.
I think this is not even discussion worthy as long as there is not one big rich guy or purely private corp owning a lot. The only thing presented in the map getting close is the crown.
The are still families with estates that own the associated village, I gather.
However many US states still don't have registration, because a thriving industry of "title insurance" companies depends upon them not having it so as to scare people into buying this otherwise useless insurance.
Or Chrome 58.0.3029.110, evidently.
Clearly we need browsers from the future to actually see the map.
Basically the answer is that the Duchy pretends that it is simply a private person (Charles Windsor) and so it shouldn't be subject to any more prying into its affairs than would be the case for you or me. This is sufficiently arguable that it doesn't fear ridicule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlebredy
It was sold in 1797 to the current family, who was a wealthy banker, so they've always been like this? :D
However, firstly (least importantly) not all land in England is registered. About 10-15% isn't registered. Registration is compulsory for new transfers today, but there are a large tracts of land whose owner hasn't changed for decades or even centuries, registration offers some benefits, but they're not obliged to register unless they want to transfer the property.
Secondly, the paperwork may just say a place is owned by a corporation in a tax haven. Knowing the land my building is on is owned by "Property Holding Corp Sierra Sixty Eighteen" in the British Virgin Islands is almost exactly the same as not knowing who owns it.
(highest value, not largest area)
I make the distinction because as an American, many of my fellows conflate the two.
That's explained pretty early on in the article.
"The map also displays some data for Wales and Scotland, where landowners' data includes this; our project is focused on England."