Tag: Enclosures

All is vanity, or so it seems in Manchester

The news today is all about Manchester City. And the shifting sands of Abu Dhabi. Vast sums of oil-derived money funding an English football club, some of it illegally, and taking it to great heights. Let’s remind ourselves where the money comes from – crude oil, laid down in the Jurassic era 150 million years ago. And how recent is its exploitation. I remember reading Wilfred Thesiger’s account of crossing the Empty Quarter of Arabia, when it was an empty quarter, reaching Abu Dhabi and seeing surveyors looking for oil. We’re back in 1948.

Let’s go back further. We’ve been in Galloway, south-west Scotland, and up in the hills. The glaciers retreated there 15,000 years ago, leaving glacial moraines, drumlins, humps of rock scraped and carried under glaciers. Go back another 450 million years and we have two continents colliding, one sliding under another, and the top level being scraped off, a mixture of mud and sand which hardened into what’s now known as greywacke. Those grassy humps in the green fields of Galloway have history.

Move forward, we’re still in Galloway, to the 18th century, and enclosures: a demand for meat and leather from expanding towns encourages landowners to consolidate their estates, throw tenants off the land, take down the old and build new walls around bigger fields. Today, further consolidating, bigger farms, and the old farm buildings left to decay.

I used to wake each morning, looking out to a field with mainly Ayrshire cattle grazing and, beyond, to the open sea. On a far coast, just visible, lay Garlieston, from where steamers took migrants, escaping lands which could no longer give them employment, to Liverpool and a life over the ocean.

The timescales of the wide world in which we’re embedded are vast and yet we proceed entirely oblivious of them. We lay down a concrete world, as if it’s forever, with no thought of what it will look like when it decays. The finer Victorian buildings were built of solid stone and that at least weathers into the landscape. We fire up a world based on oil, which has a time-limited future, and cities, and countries, whose prosperity is oil-derived, will have to rapidly adjust if they’re not to become relics themselves.

If I was a City supporter (I am Manchester born and bred and my allegiance is United), I’d have been in a sorry state this morning. City’s recent fortunes have been built on the shifting sands of Arabia. (Until sixty years ago United had a local butcher as chairman and majority shareholder.) Football is of course all about short-term and never-lasting glory. Not for a moment would I devalue it as a sport but it does entangle itself in extraordinary nets.

Manchester has the Pennine moors. Abu Dhabi has the sand and Persian Gulf. Galloway, cattle and the Irish Sea. Trump has maybe never walked a mountain path. He aspires to a vast ballroom and the infamous Trump arch. Owning football club is always a vanity project, though a far more reasonable one.

I’ve never tried it but climb to a highpoint on Man City’s Emirates stadium, and the moors will be your near neighbours.

Head there for a walk.

Trespass – good or bad?

A few thoughts on The Book of Trespass, by Nick Hayes. Published in autumn 2020 it was released in paperback last autumn.

Hayes has written a remarkable book. He trespasses on some of England’s biggest estates, climbing walls or crossing rivers as necessary. But all his trespasses would be allowable under Scottish law.

His focus is on property, and on how attitudes to property have evolved to accord with (or, put another way, dictated) the status quo in each generation. He’s not advocating revolution or confiscation. The world is as it is. His argument is for open access, and he makes it with learning and skill, and of course the necessary irreverence.

Vast acres of our landscape are the results of enclosures going back to the 16th century. And earlier. He’s good at that break-out into early modernity which followed the Reformation. Captain Pouch, and the brutality that followed rebellion in response to hunger, in the 17th century, is just one example. Hayes’s is an outsider’s view of history, and you learn new things – see them in a different way. All the while he’s gently trespassing and lighting fires and camping out.

One hero is Roger Deakin, another natural outsider. But Hayes for his part has a more  political message. There are so many examples one could quote. The 1824 Vagrancy Act as a response to soldier returning from the Napoleonic Wars without employment and hungry. He homes in on the Drax family and fortune (the head of the family is an MP) and its origins in slavery. They see no reason to feel any guilt.  William Beckford’s fortune was also based on slavery, his reputation muddled up with his status as a gay hero. Basildon Park and India, and the cornering of trade and disempowering of India and Indians, on which its fortunes were based.   

Early on Hayes brings in then foundational tome of English law, Blackstone’s Commentary, to show how the law was on the side of the men of property. Thomas Hobbes has property as a man-made construct, ‘designed to lift us out of our state of nature’. Grotius considers property as an institution invented by man but once invented it became a ‘law of nature’. For John Locke Locke if you mixed labour, ‘something this is his own’, with land he ‘thereby makes it his property’.  Blackstone asserted that ‘occupancy gave also the original right to the permanent property in the substance if the earth itself’.

We haven’t moved on much from Gainsborough’s gentleman’s idea of the English countryside. We don’t challenge the origins of the great estates. Or at least we didn’t. Which side are we on in that great debate? The National Trust is doing its best to steer a course.  There’s Croome Park in Worcestershire, half an hour from where I live, where the Trust is restoring the park to its Capability Brown glory, with some farming added in. It’s what the public wants and there lies the great irony.

We love the landscapes we’re allowed into, but don’t worry too much about being excluded. Or most of us don’t. We’re urbanised. Open up the country and most of us wouldn’t go there anyway. Hayes’s will never become a great national cause. Landowners needn’t worry. Wilderness, the festival, is safe (less so the real thing, but that’s not Hayes’s subject), despite Hayes’s attempt to fray the edges.

‘Sealing of one part of the world from another’ is Orwell specifically on nationalism. Immigrants as cockroaches. Legitimised superiority by virtue of inherited property, birth and land, blood and earth. Fascist ideas of Blut und Boden. Now we have Putin: like the rest of us Hayes didn’t see him coming.  

Hayes is the forever outsider. At Heathrow or Basildon Park or Windsor Park, he captures the landscape and the mood and the story. If they weren’t there and we were all insiders… but that can never be. (Each generation generates its own breed of powerful men, and maybe women, and they marry into the old money and land. Socialist experiments have got nowhere. Private enterprise allies with land and as liberalism is shoved aside, the boundaries shift a little or as in China radically change but boundaries remain. What do William the Conqueror and modern China have in common?)

Hayes the outsider. But I want to go with him where I can. To the hills above Hebden Bridge, bought as a shooting estate, where the moors are ‘systematically burned each year to increase the yield of new green shoots…’ I can’t see why I shouldn’t kayak on wide stretches of river. Apart from the fact I’m maybe too old. The USA seems to have got river access right early on. I’d like to see multiple footpaths opened up through great estates. And scrap this crazy world of breeding birds and then letting them out on the land for a few months in managed woodlands before shooting them.

Hayes begins with the 1932 Kinder Trespass – that’s my part of the world. Setting in train the idea that ultimately we’ll follow Scotland and open up access. Is he right that once you’ve seen the importance of land rights you can’t unsee them? Once seen, you can’t unsee the cat, as Henry George put it.

I love the ideas of heterotopia, spaces for outsiders forged deep inside society, and ‘third spaces, ‘where real life occurs’. Check them out. My daughter used to work for an organisation called ‘Free Space’, which found temporarily unoccupied spaces in London where arts projects (as I recall) could base themselves.

We need more wildernesses. (But that isn’t really Hayes’s subject. He’s not a romantic, a Muir or a Hopkins, espousing wildness for its own sake.) And charging for Stonehenge – maybe we have to. That means we exclude ‘whole sections of the population’. But is there anyone out there, other than midsummer Druids, who actually feel themselves excluded?  

So I’m with him all the way… only I’m not. And maybe he isn’t either. Turning the world upside down with some utopia at the end of the rainbow is a mug’s game. Anarchy will get us nowhere. Hayes would be lost. He’s happy with his tent and campfires. But a Robert Tombs-style history, upbeat about England and everything English, won’t get us anywhere either – unless it’s deeper into Brexit and petty nationalism. And we’d continue to walk as landowners dictate, and we may find as I have local field paths barbed-wired into the sides of fields, and rights of way diverted at a landowner’s behest, so that he can, as in one case I know, keep the best view for himself.

Apart from anything else it’s beautifully written and illustrated. In its own way it is a wonderfully wise book.