It is not easy to obtain information about landownership in England. Most other countries in Europe, and the USA, have an easily accessible cadastral map, that is a map of landownership, but the UK does not.
Following our “Landed (Freeman’s Wood)” project, I thought it would be an interesting next step to explore landownership mapping, and so I planned a project to commission artists’ cadastral maps. The maps would show both current and historical ownership, so would be layered, showing change over time. The project was intended to be an exploration of land ownership mapping in England, taking an area of north Lancashire as an example.
I had learnt enough to know that it would not be easy to gather the information necessary to produce such maps, so I proposed to conduct a pilot project, to test out what information is available and how to find it. Funding applications to Arts Council England and the Landscape Research Group were successful, and the idea became “Landed (Cadastral Maps) – a pilot”.
For our sample plot, I selected a rural east-west slice of North Lancashire, from the sea coast at the remains of Cockersand Abbey, across to the moorlands at the Trough of Bowland. It lies between the Ordnance Survey northing lines 52 to 55, and easting 40 to 63. This is about 14,500 acres, roughly 12 miles from west to east, 1.5 miles north-south. Maps showing the general location of this area are here, and a specific one is here. This geographic slice includes seacoast with salt marsh tidal flats, farmland which has been reclaimed by sea defences, higher farmland, and moorland, including grouse moors. There are north-south transport routes through it including a canal, west coast mainline railway, M6 motorway, and the A6 major road.
I commissioned two artists to work with me – Layla Curtis and Rebecca Chesney. There was no intention to produce any artworks at this stage, simply to research the sources of information which might be available.
RESEARCH
We investigated and explored sources and methods which would be required to produce artists’ cadastral maps of the area. This involved seeking information about land ownership, both current and historic.
For historical information we searched various archives. We looked at documents and maps in the archives at Lancashire Record Office, Lancaster University, the University of Central Lancashire, and the National Archives in Kew. We also searched on line documentation, particularly history websites eg British History Online.
We focussed on those documents which included maps of landownership. There is information about landowners in the area, starting before the Norman Conquest, but it is not accompanied by accurate maps until relatively recently.
The earliest we found was an estate map of 1670, which was a surprisingly close match to a contemporary OS map.
We discovered that estate auction sale documents were very useful, as they come with maps and full details of the plots for sale.
We also looked at the records of the 1910 survey of landownership. This has maps of ownership plots, together with record books which list the owners and various details about each plot.
The images show a few examples of the documents we examined – click to enlarge.
For contemporary landownership we obviously went to the Land Registry. Geographic Information Systems software enabled us to use online information from the Land Registry to create a map showing all the landownership plots (over 700), referred to as ‘polygons’, in our rectangular area. Some of these irregularly shaped polygons extend far beyond the confines of our patch.
A map created by Layla Curtis showing all the parcels of land listed by the Land Registry which lie entirely or partially within our selected area.
The Registry charges a small fee for information on the ownership of each plot, and we did not have sufficient funds to pay for them all, so we narrowed down our selection to an affordable number, about 200 plots, and produced a map of those.
Theoretically, it is possible to submit such a map to the Land Registry, and for them to supply a file in return which shows the ownership of each plot. Unfortunately, we had great difficulty in obtaining this information from the Land Registry, and despite much effort, and support from other people, we did not obtain as much data as planned, or in the format sought. After spending a lot of time on this approach, we finally decided to take the basic option of purchasing information on individual plots, one by one, on the LR website. We bought data on 50 plots in this way, distributed across our selected area, which gave a partial picture of current ownership.
Further information was obtained simply by walking and cycling across the land. I walked most, if not all, of the public footpaths in the area. It’s a great way to understand the lie of the land. I also talked to several local amateur historians, who provided lots of interesting details. Guy Shrubsole, who was then writing his book, ‘Who Owns England?’, supplied some information he had found about landownership in Lancashire.
Geographic Information Systems
As part of the project, we acquired basic knowledge of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software software and Python programming. We knew that this could be used for creating multi-layered maps with text and images, so would be an invaluable tool. Also, it has been essential for obtaining, understanding and manipulating information from the Land Registry about landownership in the area. All the LR data is in this format, and requires use of this software to access it, if information on more than a few individual land parcels, or polygons as they are designated, is required.
THE RESULTS
This funded pilot project successfully enabled us to produce an outline of landownership and its history in the selected area, and its change over the past few centuries. It was clear that a vast amount of information was available on the history of landownership in this area, from a wide variety of sources. Indeed the task of collecting would be much larger than we anticipated, and our initial research had only scratched the surface.
All three of us were keen to continue, but we could not find any further sources of funding for this type of pursuit.
For a while the project went on hold. But I had become fascinated by the subject and gradually started to pursue it further. I have continued ever since, slowly gathering further information, intermittently and independently. The findings of the pilot and some of this further research are presented in other sections of this website :-
This pilot project was funded by Arts Council England and the Landscape Research Group.