Adam Bennett

During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, approximately 22% of the English landscape was privatised through several Enclosures Acts passed through parliament[1], allowing the aristocracy and gentry to appropriate former common land into agricultural capital. W.J.T. Mitchell described this process of enclosure and dispossession of the rural population as an “internal colonization of the home country” and a “transformation from what Blake called ‘a green & pleasant land’ into a landscape, an emblem of national and imperial identity”[2]. Movement of the populace from predominantly rural to urban centres during the industrial revolution was one consequence of enclosures. It was in these urban centres that the distancing of the people from the rural landscape acted to solidify the position whereby a “disinterested gaze could be directed at the environment”[3]. Enclosing the commons was proclaimed an economic necessity, taking no account for the ecological degradation resulting from the transformation of land through agricultural improvements.

In the present day, 3% of England’s land remains registered as commons, totalling over 7000 locations ranging in size from 0.01 hectares up to the largest at over 11,000 hectares. Of these remaining commons, 57% are registered as sites of special scientific interest[4], a conservation designation given to locations which often contain rare species of fauna or flora, demonstrating the strengths of communal interest over private ownership of land as a means of ecological preservation. These spaces appear as small oases, dotted throughout the otherwise homogenous agricultural landscape, containing some of the rarest plant species still in existence. It is here that we can find some of the closest representations of the ‘natural’ landscapes of England, where human activity alongside ecological diversity continues to flourish hundreds of years on, in these locations of common ground.

[2] Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002). Landscape and power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[3] Berque, A. (2013).Thinking through Landscape. London: Routledge.

[4] DEFRA. (2015). Common Land Consent Policy. Available at:https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/477135/common-land-consents-policy.pdf