The New Enclosure

How public land has been stolen from us.

Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.“The biggest privatisation of all isn’t housing, railways, or utilities, but the oldest source of oligarchic power—land. In this clear, readable, accessible and maddening book, Brett Christophers makes clear the massive mismanagement, waste, opacity and centralisation of wealth that has resulted. Necessary reading for anyone who wants to know where ruling class power comes from, and how to take it back.”
—Owen Hatherley

“The detailed case for an English Land Commission, and the need for so many other new radical ideas not yet even first thought of. Why don’t we surround London and fill the Home Counties with National Parks where the landowner has to look after the footpaths and cycle paths and over which we all have a right to roam? The New Enclosure raises, but does not yet answer the question of from where the new commons will arise.”
—Danny Dorling

“This book forcefully explains how land ownership matters today. The New Enclosure combines a systematic analysis of the role of land and landownership in capitalist society with a compelling critique of neoliberalism in Britain. Christophers demonstrates that recent decades have seen a massive transfer of public land into private control. He documents the overwhelmingly negative and unjust consequences of this new process of enclosure and demolishes the ideology of privatization upon which it is based. No one who cares about the politics of land can ignore this powerful argument.”
—David Madden

“British taxpayers have been robbed blind by the recent fire sale of 400 billion pounds of public land. Like Henry VIII’s destruction of the monasteries, Thatcher’s privatisation frenzy has led to the destruction of public assets unprecedented amongst leading economies, and to the enrichment of landowners and financiers. In this comprehensive and rigorously researched book, Brett Christophers opens up a field of study—public land—largely buried by academia, landowners and no doubt, by financiers. A must-read.”
—Ann Pettifor

“With his carefully crafted and meticulously researched study, he has made an essential contribution to our understanding of politics and government in modern Britain.”
—Adam Tooze, Financial Times

“If you’re someone who’s interested in Britain—and I mean Britain tout court: the whole 80,823 square miles of its physical existence—then this is a book you must read.”
—Will Self, Guardian

“Eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. [The] subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker.”
—Diane Coyle, The Enlightened Economist

“The New Enclosure fills a gaping hole in our understanding of the contemporary history of British capitalism. It offers a forensic analysis of the privatisation of British land, contributes to our understanding of recent economic transformations and provides a distinctive account of neoliberalism.”
—John Tomaney, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, LSE Review of Books

“Christophers’s approach to this underexplored facet of British neoliberalism is weighty, comprehensive and outraged. His depiction of this process as the ‘New Enclosure’ consciously echoes historic anger at the injustices of the first enclosures of the early modern period.”
—Julian Dobson, The Town Planning Review

“Towers with empirical and argumentative force … a stunning work of scholarship.”
—Orion

“If you’re interested in Britain, you must read this painstaking survey of land privatisation since the Thatcher era.”
—Will Self, Guardian

“Christophers is writing in the tradition of great historians such as R. H. Tawney and E. P. Thompson.”
—Martin Daunton, Journal of Modern History

Brett Christophers is a political economist and economic geographer, and the author of Rentier Capitalism and of The New Enclosure, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.