Brett Christophers has produced a searching analysis of the selling-off of British public land in the years since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. Concerned primarily with the past forty years, he does not offer a history of British landownership other than the amount required to underpin his argument. And the argument is that, like the earlier wave of enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern form is also essentially about the privatisation of land. ‘Enclosure’ in the title therefore is somewhat misleading: it is only used as a proxy for privatisation and there is no attempt to compare the two episodes. And physical enclosure in its more accepted historical sense is irrelevant. One chapter offers some historical background, although most will be very familiar to the rural historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.

Also familiar is the persistent problem of data. Indeed, there is arguably more information available for the period 1840–1940 than there is for the analyst of modern landownership. Hence the importance of recent attempts to shed light on the opaque situation by writers such as Guy Shrubsole in his book Who Owns England? (2019), building on the earlier work of Kevin Cahill and Andy Wightman.

So, the author explains, there has been, and indeed continues to be, a quiet revolution in landownership, which has seen approximately two million hectares of public land taken into private ownership since 1979, or, astonishingly, about 10 per cent of Britain. Perhaps 50 or 60 per cent of the original total of public land, especially that belonging to local authorities, has been privatised under the ideological remit of (mainly) Conservative central government from Whitehall. Christophers examines in a clear and nuanced analysis, in part guided by writers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey and Karl Polanyi, the problematic definition of public land ‘surplus’ and the consequent ‘logic of disposal’, including its rationale, processes and outcomes. The rationale, effectively dismantled by Christophers, is that public land has been used wastefully in many cases, that there is land waiting to be used, especially for much needed housing, and that housing can most efficiently be produced by private companies. It is the case anyway that local authority council housing has almost ceased following Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ legislation that sold off much local authority housing at knock-down prices. Since then everything has been done by Whitehall to assist the transfer of public land, including benefiting from the impact of austerity on benighted local authorities whose undertakings have shrunk, requiring less land. Much has also come from the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, Forestry Commission and the water and railway undertakings. Even more insidious has been the selling-off of thousands of school playing fields, quite contrary to recent anxieties about children’s lack of exercise, obesity, etc.

The historic intertwining of land and power, so familiar to the historian, continues apace today. But the sheer extent of this ongoing land grab has now been exposed in this important addition to the critical literature on neoliberalism.