Enclosure Didn't Just Take the Land. It Took the Neighbours Too.

Ask most people what the Enclosure Acts took, and they'll say the land. That's true, and it matters — a few hundred years of parliamentary acts turned common land that whole villages shared into private, fenced property, handed mostly to people who already had plenty. But the land wasn't the only thing that got carved up and handed away. So did the reasons people needed each other.

Before enclosure, a commons wasn't just a field — it was infrastructure. You grazed your animals alongside your neighbour's. You gathered fuel and foraged together, worked out between you who cut hay when, covered for each other during illness or a hard lambing season, because the land you depended on was shared, so the depending on each other was built in. Take the shared land away and you don't just lose grazing rights. You lose the everyday, unglamorous reasons people were in each other's lives at all.

We don't think that's a coincidence, and we don't think it's only history. A lot of what gets called a loneliness problem, or a mental health crisis, or communities "losing their sense of place," traces back to the same root: fewer and fewer reasons left for people to need each other in person, regularly, doing something real. You can go a long time now without having to ask a neighbour for anything. That sounds like independence. It can just as easily be isolation with better branding.

This is the bit of the enclosure story that doesn't always get told alongside the land-grab part — that what was stolen wasn't only soil and grazing rights, it was a structure for belonging. Land as a shared relationship forced people into contact with each other. Land as a private asset, fenced and gated, doesn't.

The vision behind Rooted Common Ground Farms is to put a small, real version of that structure back. Not to recreate a feudal commons — we're not precious about the past, and plenty of it was hard and unequal in its own ways. But the basic shape still works: when a plot of land belongs to everyone who shows up to it, rather than to whoever can afford to buy it, people end up needing each other again in the small ways that used to be normal. Someone waters the beds while you're away. Someone else knows how to deal with blight and tells you before you lose the lot. You end up knowing the names of people who live three streets over, because you've been stood next to them with your hands in the same soil.

That's "Better together" in the most literal, unglamorous sense we mean it. Not a slogan about niceness. A description of what land held in common actually does to the people who share it — it manufactures reasons to be in relationship, the same reasons that got quietly engineered out when the fences went up.

We're aware this is still a proposed network, not a map with pins on it yet. We're working towards land held in trust, community-run, open to people regardless of whether they own a garden of their own — and we're honest that right now that's a direction we're walking in, not a thing we've finished building. But the thinking behind it isn't new or untested. It's one of the oldest ideas there is: that people look after land and each other better when both are shared than when either is locked away. The Enclosure Acts bet against that idea, for the benefit of the few who got the deeds. We're betting back in the other direction, one plot at a time.

You don't need to already know your neighbours to start. You don't need to own anything, or prove you deserve a place here. You just need somewhere to show up, and a reason to keep showing up alongside other people doing the same unglamorous, patient work. That's what shared land is for. It always was.