The Land Was Never Wasteland

There's a word that shows up again and again in the paperwork behind the Enclosure Acts: waste. Common land — the meadows, fens, heaths and strips that ordinary people grazed animals on, gathered fuel from, grew food on — was routinely described by the people enclosing it as "wasteland." Unproductive. Going to waste. Crying out to be improved.

It wasn't going to waste. It was feeding people. It was where a family without much land of their own could still keep a few geese, cut some peat, pick blackberries, let their children run. It had a use — it just wasn't a use that showed up as profit on anyone's ledger. And that turned out to be exactly the problem, for the people who wanted it fenced.

"Improvement" is a word worth sitting with, because it's still doing the same job today. Land gets called underused right up until someone works out how to extract more value from it — more yield, more houses, more return per acre. The people already living alongside it, using it in ways that don't reduce neatly to a number, rarely get consulted about whether it needed improving in the first place.

We think about this a lot at Rooted Common Ground Farms, because the vision we're working towards — a proposed network of community farm spaces held in trust across central England — only makes sense if you start from the opposite premise. Land that people can walk onto, dig in, sit on, grow something in, isn't waste. It's doing exactly what land is for. The waste is a field nobody's allowed into, mowed for appearance, valued only as a line on a balance sheet, while people twenty minutes away have nowhere to put their hands in soil.

None of this is a grievance against anyone currently holding land. The Enclosure Acts weren't the work of any single villain — they were a centuries-long pattern, parliamentary act by parliamentary act, that took land held in common and handed it to individual owners, mostly the ones who already had the most. We're not interested in relitigating who did what to whom two hundred years ago. We're interested in the pattern, because the pattern is still running: land as something to extract from and hold onto, rather than something to be in relationship with. That's the thing we're trying to reverse, one plot at a time, not any person's title deed.

What would it look like to actually reverse it, even a little? Not reclaiming vast estates — that's not what this is. It's smaller and stranger than that: land held by a trust rather than an individual, so it can never be quietly sold off when someone needs the cash or the market shifts. Land that doesn't ask what you can pay, or what you can prove about yourself, before it lets you dig. Land that's there for the people who aren't born yet as much as it's there for us — which is precisely the kind of long horizon a balance sheet can't hold, because a balance sheet doesn't think in generations.

We're honest that this is still a vision rather than a place you can visit. There's no farm gate to walk through yet, no acreage to point to on a map. What there is, is a growing conviction — ours, and hopefully soon a community's — that the "wasteland" framing was always self-serving, and that a plot of land with muddy boots on it and vegetables coming up is worth more than the same plot mowed short and fenced off, however that fence gets justified. Better together means believing that, and building towards it, even before there's soil under our own fingernails.

The old justification said the land was going to waste until someone made it productive for themselves. Ours says the opposite: land is at its most productive — for people, for soil, for whatever comes after us — when it belongs to everyone who needs it and no one who'd hoard it. That's not a nostalgia trip back to the commons. It's a plain argument that the commons had it right, and enclosure was the mistake we've spent two centuries treating as progress.