The Land is Ours

The Land is Ours is a British land rights campaign advocating access to the land, its resources, and the planning processes.

The group was set up in 1995 by George Monbiot and others.[1]

Their first campaign was the occupation of the disused Wisley Airfield in Surrey by 400 people in 1995 from which there was a live broadcast on the BBC's Newsnight programme. Nearby St. George's Hill is symbolically significant as it was previously seized by the Diggers in 1649, who planted vegetables on the common land there. The group finally occupied the hill in 1999, the 350th anniversary of the Diggers' occupation.

Starting in coaches from Hammersmith Unemployed Workers' Centre on Sunday 5 May 1996 the group set up Pure Genius!!, an eco-village on a squatted derelict former distillery site owned by Guinness in Wandsworth, London. The site was evicted on 15 October 1996. This was the day before the London Wildlife Trust were meeting to officially designate the site as a conservation site containing many species of flowers and birds classed as 'extremely rare' in London.

On 1 April 1999, on the 350th anniversary of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers occupation of the English Civil War on the same hill, The Land Is Ours organised a rally, then occupied land at St. Georges Hill near Weybridge, Surrey. The archived Diggers 350 email list, which was started at the time of this historic occupation continues to follow UK and international land rights stories to this day .[2]

In April 2004 The Land Is Ours occupied Castell Henllys, a tourist site with reconstructed Iron Age roundhouses, in protest at Pembrokeshire National Park's decision to demolish Tony Wrench's live-in roundhouse at Brithdir Mawr.

In 2009 a group inspired by The Land Is Ours opened Kew Bridge Eco Village, a squatted eco-village on land owned by property developers St George; this was evicted on 27 May 2010.

References

  1. ↑ Monbiot, George (22 February 1995), "A Land Reform Manifesto" (– Scholar search), The Guardian (London), retrieved 2008-08-06
  2. ↑ "Diggers 350 Email list commenced April 1999".

External links