The Enclosure Acts Decided Whose Grandchildren Would Own Something

Here's a question that doesn't come up much when people talk about land: whose grandchildren get to own any of it, and whose don't — and when was that decided?

For a lot of England, the answer is: a few hundred years ago, mostly between the 1600s and the 1800s, in a wave of enclosure that turned common land — land ordinary people had grazed animals on, gathered wood from, grown food on for generations — into private, fenced, legally owned property. Parliament passed thousands of Enclosure Acts. Landowners got title deeds. Everyone else got told to find somewhere else to be.

It's easy to talk about enclosure as a historical footnote — something that happened, got absorbed, and is done with. It isn't done with. What enclosure actually did was draw a line through time, not just through fields. On one side of that line, a family's land became something that could be held, improved, passed down, and grown into more. On the other side, a family's relationship to that same land was simply ended. No compensation, no transition, no "here's your share instead." Just: not yours anymore.

That's not ancient history sitting quietly in a museum. That's the starting gun for generational wealth as we still understand it in Britain. The families who ended up on the right side of enclosure had something to leave their children, and their children had something to leave theirs, compounding for ten generations. The families who got pushed off had to start from zero, in every generation, with nothing to pass down but the work itself. You don't have to believe in some grand conspiracy to see that one decision, repeated thousands of times across a couple of centuries, decided an enormous amount about who was born owning something and who wasn't — and that pattern hasn't finished playing out. It's still playing out in who can afford a garden, let alone a field.

We're not interested in re-fighting the 1700s. We're interested in the fact that the same choice — who gets to hold land, and on what terms — is still being made, right now, every time a piece of land changes hands. And we think it's worth making differently.

The vision behind Rooted Common Ground Farms is a proposed network of community growing spaces held in trust rather than owned outright by any one person or family. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Land held in trust can't be sold out from under the people who depend on it, can't be quietly passed down a single bloodline, can't be improved for ten generations by one family while everyone else pays rent on the privilege of standing nearby. It's held for whoever needs it now, and for the people who aren't born yet — which is a very different inheritance than the one enclosure handed out. Nobody has to own a plot to belong to it. You just have to show up and put your hands in it.

We want to be honest about where this actually stands: there's no farm open yet. No land secured, no address to visit. What exists right now is the groundwork — the thinking, the structure, the case for why land held this way is worth building towards — while Rooted Networks Ltd works towards Community Interest Company status. We're not claiming more than that, because the whole point of what we're trying to build is permanence that's actually earned, not promised ahead of itself.

But the direction is clear, and it's the opposite direction from enclosure. Enclosure took land that belonged to everyone and handed it to the few, generation after generation, compounding quietly in the background of British life. What we're working towards reverses that, one plot at a time, one piece of land taken out of the market and put into trust for good. Small and real beats a masterplan on paper — so we're not promising a nationwide network overnight. We're saying: this is the shape of the thing we think is worth building, and we think the history of how land got taken is exactly why it's worth building it this way.

The land remembers patience. It also, in its own slow way, remembers who it was taken from. We'd rather be on the side of giving some of it back.