Every Landscape Is Also That Landscape: Fields, Housing and Land Ownership in Britain

By Tom Branfoot

Who decides whether a field is worthy of remaining, either as arable, common land or a green space at all? Labour’s new policy for redesignating some Green Belt land as ‘Grey Belt’ to cope with the housing emergency in Britain led me to consider the changing landscape of England and the increasing threat to rural and semi-rural environments. Like the one I grew up in, Bailiff Bridge, a post-industrial village on the outskirts of Bradford bearing the remnants of a textile industry, verdant edgelands, overgrown railway embankments, and an inescapable proximity to the M62.

The concept of the Green Belt was introduced in 1947 in an attempt to halt urban sprawl, protect our green and pleasant shires, and preserve boundaries between towns and cities. Labour is proposing to develop unlovely tracts of land such as brownfield sites, agricultural, and ‘lower quality’ land, which are currently protected. Building on decommissioned zones lichened with rust and land damaged by intensive farming are not terrible ideas, but the government will first have to define ‘Grey Belt’ and champion regenerative agriculture.

Britain is a relatively small island nation in the global arena; nevertheless, the duplicitous myth of land shortage perpetuated by the media elite detracts from the principal issue of private ownership. There is more than enough space for all of us while retaining green spaces, fields, and protected landscapes crucial to our physical and mental health. Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population, while the total area of all Green Belt in the country is 13%, much of which is private, non-accessible land. Before building on protected areas, an assessment of privately-owned land in England is necessary.

The English landscape we now think of is the product of human intervention over the past 1500 years. Most prehistoric fields – from the Old English feld meaning ‘open land’ – were used for arable crops, pasture, and grazing for livestock. Now an iconic fixture of the English countryside, fields were integrated parts of settlements until industrialisation banished them to the rural, enforcing distance between citizens and green spaces. Until very recently in the history of human civilisation, we have lived alongside fields.

In medieval England, the open field system was the dominant form of cultivation. This communal system ensured the distribution of resources among inhabitants, individual strips and furlongs were systematically shared though monitored and regulated by the Lord of the Manor. Ploughing strips produced the distinctive ridge-and-furrow pattern, forming the shape of a reversed ‘S’ from a birds-eye view due to the movement of the ox-team driving the plough.

Since land became commodified, the extractive politics and toxic ramifications of private ownership have marred approaches to the environment. To become a commodifiable asset, land must be cleared and enclosed to permit the formation of an agricultural and later industrial wage labour system. A similar process of denaturalisation occurred during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The industrial-scale conversion of humans into property not only authorised the most heinous crimes against humanity but regulated, funded and legitimised them. As with slavery, ‘imperialist Britain forcibly ‘remade’ places as property’, to quote James Trafford in The Empire at Home. Dispossession of Irish land for the English ruling class and the Highland Clearances in Scotland demonstrate similar colonial legacies of property ownership and capital accumulation closer to home.

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I grew up in a house facing a system of fields demarcated by hedgerows, trees, and designated paths. Unmapped yet claimed by various owners and veined by a nameless beck, this was my pastoral idyll as a child, though always in earshot of the A649. A few farms operated in these fields, yet most were pastures, paddocks, meadowland, allotments and the occasional field with an unidentified purpose.

One of these fields contains a tumulus that we utilised as cover for a game involving an imagined threat. I walked this land recently with my partner to see the tumulus up close and got accosted by an enraged farmer whose face was redder than a scarlet lily beetle, clearing us out of his property, my childhood pastoral. If we had a dog and there were cows in the field, he told us, he would have shot the dog. The driveway to his new farmhouse was cluttered by Range Rovers. I was astonished by the hypertensive anger directed at a couple of local ramblers over unintentional trespass. Walking away from a heated argument with that landowner – an altercation which all propertyless citizens would lose – I noticed the mound was enclosed by a fresh oak fence, trees planted around its perimeter, and realised the threat had materialised there.

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“Inscape” is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ coinages signifying the intrinsic uniqueness of a natural being or place, its inner shape or dimension; something government policy cannot begin to identify. As a child, witnessing the occasional planning permission notice stapled to fence posts, I told my mum I would lie in the fields if the bulldozers came to take them away. They never did. Imperceptibly, change would occur, walls and fences erected, houses edging closer, and trees felled. Those fields have a pulsing inscape in my life, such allure that every landscape is also that landscape.

Landscape is inextricable from loss, any semblance of wildness has been moderated, attenuated, and extracted for resources. A Guardian report revealed that divergence from environmental protections after Brexit has already caused ecological damage in the UK including the use of EU-banned chemicals, higher pesticide use and dirtier water. Removing protections implemented to slow down the rate of environmental damage and prohibit further climate breakdown has catastrophic long-term effects for short-term gains.

Since 1980, intensive farming practices have cost us one in every six birds, with farmland bird species such as song thrush, lapwings, skylarks and house sparrows in rapid decline, according to the RSPB. Increasing use of pesticides depletes their food sources, and the demolition of hedgerows to increase arable land all contribute to species loss, with ground nesting birds hit hardest. Land managers across the UK are being financially incentivised to create flower-rich margins in arable land, temporary grassland and bush orchards as part of DEFRA’s Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot. Agricultural land amounts to 71% of the UK land total, so if every farmer followed the guidance to plant and sustain flowers and grasses in a ‘block in a field, margins along the edge of a field, next to water bodies’, then bees and pollinators, invertebrates and farmland birds would fare much better than at present.

Climate change will severely impact food security due to crops failing and pests, drought, and flooding. We need to become more self-sufficient in domestic food production, relying less on imports and growing more in Britain. As such, agriculture and soil health are leading ecological and economic concerns, but without a clear vision of sustainable agriculture, the DEFRA incentive for planting flower-rich grass margins is offset by divergence from EU environmental protections.

Not enough is being done to mitigate the impact of climate breakdown and severe biodiversity loss, and not enough is being done to combat the pressures of the housing crisis in Britain. What little is being done seems more distressing for the future of natural environments. Short-termism is a toxic problem in Western politics. Rather than investing in public services which would benefit the population in the long run, the UK government has underinvested and cut services since austerity began. There is an ecological dimension to this problem – short-term decisions create unalterable environmental consequences. Despite what the techno-optimist elite espouse, de-extinction is not a reality. For ourselves or any other species.

Mass interconnection in the digital world has arrived simultaneously with our increasing separation from nature and the wilful destruction of species and habitats motivated by capital gain. Vulnerable populations, especially in the Global South, are becoming climate migrants through the compounded stresses of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and surging global temperatures. Increasingly, humans will encounter the same issues as other-than-human species in the Anthropocene – habitats decimated with nowhere to seek refuge in an international architecture hostile to migrants and others.

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The housing crisis is among the most pertinent social problems facing the UK. More affordable houses need building, actual houses that are actually affordable. Due to the depletion of social housing through Conservative right-to-buy policies, the lack of new dwellings to replace those bought out of use, and extortionate mortgage rates following Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget disaster in September 2022, there is incomprehensible demand for private rental properties with nowhere near enough accommodation to compensate. Which has led to the normalisation of sub-standard housing with renters spending 38% of their average income on rent. In towns and cities, apartments go instantly to the highest bidder and you are lucky to get a viewing. According to Savills’, since the 1950s, the average UK house price has risen by 365% – even on an inflation-adjusted scale.

Despite a shortage of affordable housing, where I live in Bradford, there are an astonishing amount of abandoned, unused or untenanted buildings – old offices and factories which would be suitable for conversion to housing. There is even a fully furnished block of student accommodation on Hamm Strasse that has been left vacant for years while a growing homeless population live in an encampment under the railway arches at Forster Square, less than half a mile away. Something has gone terribly wrong.

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I would love nothing more than to own a home in the West Yorkshire countryside, which is deficient in new housing, and for good reason – where would it go without damaging the spirit of the place? Moreover, the cultural heritage of the Brontës, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in those natural environments means they are protected, if not legally, then by public opposition to development. Many of us cannot afford to buy a house – while 1,627,450 dwellings are used as second addresses in England, according to the Office for National Statistics, generally with one home in a city and another in the country.

Keir Starmer has declared he would ‘bulldoze Nimby opposition to build new homes’. Cultural commentators are quick to address the marketing master stroke that is the Green Belt, which technically exists only to halt urban sprawl yet has become a bucolic paragon of English heritage. Starmer’s threat to ‘bulldoze opposition’ creates an image of the Chilterns demolished by a Barratt Homes squadron. In that sense, reallocating certain ‘poor quality’, ‘ugly’ areas to a rebranded Grey Belt sounds conducive to changing public opinion. But who decides whether a field is ‘ugly’ and what constitutes a ‘genuine nature spot’?

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Dwelling is a form of place-making and interacting with our environment, binding humanity with the creaturely. But our commodification of land into asset has deepened inequalities in the basic human rights of food and shelter. In common with all other species, we need to eat and should produce more food using sustainable methods for future generations. If the Western imperialist elite will destroy complex ecosystems of other-than-human habitats, they will also decimate access to housing for marginalised social groups such as working-class people, migrants, queer, disabled, Black and Brown communities, and vulnerable people young and old.

As in the medieval period, economic inequality is vast, we pay rent to the landlord and are dispossessed from the land, only now there is more power to destroy. Being in a field, in the landscape increasingly closed off to us, is a radical act of trespass, conceptually and materially. Goldfinch flitter as my feet surpass deliberate strategies of disempowerment, standing in a hinterland of vetch.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.