Last month we looked at Big Money: "Mapping the Grosvenor Estate". Today a few more of the fams.
From Who Owns England:
The Crown, the Church, and five aristocratic estates with a collective wealth of £22billion still own a thousand acres of central London’s super-prime real estate. That’s the conclusion of an investigation carried out by Who Owns England, featured in today’s Telegraph.
Alongside a number of newer estates, and a welter of offshore investors, these Great Estates collect millions of pounds in annual rents, making their owners some of the richest people in Britain. Yet much of the wealth of these landlords stems simply from the happy accident of inheriting land in one of the world’s most overheated property markets. With London homeownership increasingly unaffordable for the bulk of the population, isn’t it time we started seriously exploring forms of land value tax to even things up a little?
The Octopus of LandlordismIn 1925, the radical journalist W.B. Northrup published a postcard depicting a giant octopus, labelled ‘landlordism’, spreading its tentacles across London. Each tentacle curled around the boundaries of one of the Great Estates in possession of central London, listing their acreage and yearly rents. (You can see it pictured above.)
Northrup’s postcard, besides being a striking piece of graphic propaganda, is a valuable insight into London’s landowners a century ago. The Victorians excluded London from their 1873 ‘Second Domesday’, the Return of Owners of Land, so we don’t have a solid source from the late 19th century. But, spooling forward a bit, we have a more recent guide in the form of a 1986 book, Who Owns London?, by journalist Shirley Green. Together with Kevin Cahill’s indispensable Who Owns Britain (2001) and a range of newspaper reports, I’ve been able to piece together the table below of some of the biggest estates in central London and their changing fortunes over the past century.
Owner 1925 1986 2017 Cadogan Estate (Earl Cadogan) 200 acres c.90 acres 93 acres (source) Grosvenor Estate (Duke of Westminster) 400 acres 300 acres 300 acres (source) Portman Estate (Viscount Portman) 270 acres 110 acres 110 acres (source) (Baroness) Howard de Walden Estate 292 acres 110 acres 92 acres (source) Church Commissioners (Paddington/ Hyde Park Estate) ? (“£500k annual ground rents”). Green 1986 states that comprised 500 acres up to 1950s 90 acres 90 acres (redrawn this map & measured area) The Crown Estate – – 300 acres (Cahill 2001) Duke of Bedford (Russell family) 250 acres 20 acres 20 acres (Cahill 2001) Marquess of Northampton 260 acres – 20 acres (Cahill 2001) ***** Together, these 16 estates own around 1,453 acres of central London. All very well, you say, but in London location is everything: where do they own? Reader, let me draw you a map:...
....MUCH MORE
