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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

> people don't own the land their houses are built on, they just lease them like medieval serfs would have, since land reform never happened in England.

I’m curious about this - are you referring to leaseholds? Because that seems to mainly exist for flats. If you have a freehold (like almost every house has) you definitely own the land.

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Freehold didn't apply to much of London. Many areas are still technically owned by large landowners, Dukes and so forth.

Not a huge amount of London, and not most of greater London, but definitely applicable to the Royal boroughs.

You might find Guy Shrubsole's book, Who Owns England?, an interesting read. It deals with land ownership, so not directly with freehold v leasehold for householders, but it contains some startling statistics.

There's a decent review of the book (from 2019) here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-engla...

Technically the Queen (the crown) owns all the land. In practice it doesn't make much difference, but it does kick in if a freehold suddenly has no owner.

In reality, all nations have dealt with that problem in roughly the same way, the land reverts to the state.

In the US if an owner of property can't be identified, then it's given to the state to deal with and in France it goes to the local authority.

In most of the UK, the land is given to the Crown Estate (not the monarchs personal property but to fund the country). The exception is Cornwall and Lancashire, where it's given to the relevant duchies (i.e. the prince of wales and the monarch), who by convention sell it and donate the proceeds to charity.

Freehold houses aren't as common as you think, especially in London. Across England about a third of houses are leasehold.

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