Sunday book review – The Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole

This is Guy Shrubsole’s best book yet, despite the success of his excellent Who Owns England (reviewed here) and his book about soggy, slippery woods, The Lost Rainforests of Britain (reviewed here) because this book is about everything! It covers a lot of ground, all of it, because it is about land use and who gets to decide.

We are taken through grouse shooting, pheasant releasing, land drainage, access rights, community ownership, National (unnatural) Parks, river guardians and the case for state ownership of more land in order to deliver public goods such as carbon storage and wildlife. The message of the book is that it has proved unwise to swallow the nonsense that land owners are all guardians of the countryside just because they keep telling us that they are. Well, they would say that wouldn’t they?  Some are, some aren’t, and to protect the public interest from those who aren’t we should take back more power either individually or (and/or) through the state.

I’m really pleased to see the idea of increased state ownership of land promoted here to a wide audience and Guy is kind enough to quote from my book Reflections where I make that case too. I remember that, years ago, Guy and I spoke at an event in Bristol where I said much the same and he quipped that it was a bit unsettling to find an ex-RSPB member of staff being more radical than an ex-FoE member of staff but he has come round, as has, in a feeble way, much of the conservation establishment. With a Labour government this must be the best opportunity to see some change but taking water companies back into public ownership has been ruled out in recent days and with it the opportunity to manage large areas of the uplands for water, carbon and wildlife rather than burn it or graze it for private profit. We can’t really complain as this was not in the recent Labour manifesto, though it was in the previous one, but it may not come back as an opportunity while Labour is in power.

There isn’t very much here about farming, which is slightly surprising, and very little as exhibits for the case for change on the loss of wildlife on farmed land across lowland areas. I was a bit surprised by that.

I remain agnostic about increased rights to roam whereas the author is an advocate of them. But I’m agnostic partly because it isn’t clear to me what the advocates want to see. How much do they want? This probably wasn’t the place to set out those arguments in full but I feel I’m still waiting nervously to see what they are.

I’m slightly hampered by working from an uncorrected proof as a review copy that doesn’t have the acknowledgements nor, more importantly, the index in it and there are a few typesetting mistakes which have probably now been corrected. But this is undoubtedly an excellent book, not because I agree with most of it, but because it is well-researched, very well written and deals with important issues in a persuasive way.

As we get ever closer to the time when I’ll reveal my books of the year for 2024, authors like Guy Shrubsole just make the task more difficult but it seems inconceivable to me that this book won’t be in my top 5, but  conceivably it might be in my top 1.

The cover? It’s OK, I originally thought I should give it 7/10 but front covers that are designed to accommodate the adverts aren’t that aesthetically pleasing, are they? The most interesting part of this cover is the  attractively depicted landscape, but when the eye is drawn to that, one looks through the title, and the landscape only occupies half of the cover space. Imagine that landscape filled the cover and the title of the book was at the top and the author’s name at the foot?  That would be rather conventional but much more beautiful and might well have got 9/10 from me, but on mature and long consideration I’d give this cover 4/10. One could almost decide that the cover was wittily allegorical and a comment on the triumph of the profit motive over natural beauty.

The Lie of the Land: who really cares for the countryside by Guy Shrubsole is  published by William Collins.

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Buy direct from Blackwell’s – a proper bookshop (and I’ll get a little bit of money from them)

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