The Enclosure Acts Took the Land. We're Trying to Give Some Back.

There's a version of English history that doesn't get taught much in school, and it's the one that explains why so much of this country's land is fenced off, gated, or simply out of reach for most of the people who live near it.

Between the 1600s and the 1800s, Parliament passed thousands of Enclosure Acts. Land that had been common — shared grazing, shared woodland, shared ground that ordinary people used to feed their families and their animals — was fenced off and handed to landowners. Villagers who had farmed and foraged that land for generations lost the right to touch it. Some of the fences and hedgerows you still see crossing the English countryside today are literally the boundary lines drawn by that process. They're not natural features. They're the physical trace of a decision to take something shared and make it private.

We're not bringing this up to relitigate the 18th century. We're bringing it up because the pattern didn't stop there. Land ownership in England today is still remarkably concentrated — a small percentage of people and institutions hold a large share of it — and most of us grow up with no real relationship to land at all. We might walk past fields every day without ever setting foot in one. We might live our whole lives without growing a single thing we eat. That's not because people don't want to. It's because the land isn't there for them to do it on.

That's the conflict at the heart of what we're trying to build with Rooted Common Ground Farms. Not a grievance against any particular landowner — this isn't about individuals, it's about a pattern that got baked into how this country holds land — but a genuine belief that the pattern is wrong, and that it can be worked against, patiently, plot by plot.

The vision is a network of community farm spaces across central England, held in trust rather than owned as private assets. That distinction matters more than it might sound. Land held in trust for a community can't quietly be sold off when someone decides there's more money in flats or a private estate. It can't be flipped. It's held for a purpose, and that purpose is written down and protected, not left to the discretion of whoever happens to hold the deed this decade. What's held in trust can't be sold out from under the people who depend on it — that permanence is the whole point.

We're working towards Community Interest Company status for Rooted Networks Ltd, the organisation behind this — not charity status, and we won't pretend otherwise. A CIC is a legal structure built around a locked-in social purpose: the assets and any profit have to serve that purpose, not shareholders. It's not the same protection a trust gives, but it's a serious commitment in the same direction, and it's the honest legal shape of where we are right now.

None of this is about owning land for its own sake, either. You don't need to hold a title to belong somewhere. The whole point of a shared plot is that it's shared — anyone who wants to dig, weed, sit in the sun with a cup of tea, or just be somewhere green without paying for the privilege, is welcome. That's not a marketing line. It's the actual difference between a fenced field nobody's allowed in and a plot anyone can walk onto and start pulling weeds.

We also think about this in terms of people who aren't born yet. Land held in trust isn't just for the people using it this year — it's meant to still be there, still growing food, still doing what it does, for whoever comes after us. That's a different kind of ownership question than "who benefits now." It's "who does this still serve in fifty years."

To be clear about where things actually stand: this is a proposed network. No land has been acquired yet. We're not going to invent a farm that doesn't exist, or pretend we've got acreage secured when we haven't. What we do have is a clear intention, a legal structure we're building towards, and a belief — inherited from the wider Rooted Common Ground movement — that everyone has the capacity to be a great person and a good neighbour, and that people aren't broken, the systems that isolated them from land, from community, from each other, are.

Reversing a few centuries of enclosure with one small proposed network of farm spaces is, obviously, not going to undo the Enclosure Acts. We're not claiming it will. But small and real beats large and managed, and one plot that actually works matters more than a masterplan on paper. The land remembers patience. So do we.

Better together.