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TLIO - Who & What?
What is The Land Is Ours?
The Land Is Ours is a campaign, not an organization. It has a tiny budget.
All the work at present is done by volunteers, scattered around the country,
There is no hierarchical structure - the important decisions are made by consensus at regular meetings.
Our role is to highlight ordinary people's exclusion not only from the land itself
but also from the decision making processes affecting it, and to campaign and facilitate
other people's campaigns to put this right. As well as organizing events itself, TLIO functions
as an umbrella group, putting local campaigns in touch with each other, providing research,
media support, political lobbying, contacts and ideas.
The Early Days.
The campaign began with the occupation of a disused airfield and set-aside land near
St George's Hill in Surrey, which the Diggers seized in 1649. Around 600 people built
a village and gardens, performed a play and distributed information in the neighbouring
towns. We succeeded in starting a national debate on land, with favourable coverage in all
the broadsheets and most national TV and radio news programmes.
Soon afterwards, we occupied Shirburn Hill, near Watlington, Oxfordshire, the property
of the Earl of Macclesfield, in support of people trying to get access to his 2000 acres
and to try to stop him neglecting one of the county's last areas of chalk downland.
Oxfordshire County Council adopted a motion supporting us and calling for land reform.
We are now approaching every county council, as well as opening a dialogue with the
Parliamentary Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.
The Green Party has already adopted our aims as policy.
At the end of 1995, TLIO launched a competition for Britain's best and worst landowners.
Nominations from the public were assessed by a panel of independent judges.
The Duke of Westminster was voted worst landowner (he has got a special dispensation to inspect
tenants' homes at any time, while excluding walkers from thousands of acres of his
Forest of Bowland estate, on the basis that they are intruding on his privacy) and
Daphne Buxton of Norfolk was voted best landowner, after she established the first
common in England this century. Another competition was launched at the end of 1996.
In May 1996, 500 Land is Ours activists occupied 13 acres of derelict land on the
banks of the River Thames in Wandsworth, highlighting the appalling misuse of urban land,
the lack of provision of affordable housing and the deterioration of the urban environment.
The site was destined for the 9th major superstore within a radius of a mile and a half.
We cleared the site of rubble and rubbish, built a village entirely from recycled materials
and planted gardens. We held onto it for five and half months, until it was evicted by bailiffs
acting for the owners, Guinness. It was visited by thousands of people, many of whom had come
from abroad to see it. It attracted publicity all over the world, and pushed the issues it
highlighted up the political agenda.
For information and the websites of past campaigns & actions go to our
Campaigns archive
or have a look at the following TLIO newsletter features:
Diggers350 - Return to St George's Hill.
Ketts Rebellion revisited
The Land is Ours and its local groups also try to help local campaigns to get off the ground, and to
work with communities around Britain which are trying to save common spaces or reclaim land
for the community. We can help with research and media work, lobbying, and networking.
There's always a huge amount to be done, and we're always short of volunteers - so if you can
help in any way at all, please get in touch.
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