Here’s why we need to fight for Britain’s right to roam
Finland is officially the happiest country. Perhaps the Finns’ freedom to roam has something to do with that
by: Leah Gordon
24 Oct 2025
The Sipoonkorpi national park is just 20km from Helsinki city centre. Image: Jussi Hellsten
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As the UK drops again in the World Happiness Report while Finland soars, this questions the vital importance of access to the countryside and the physical, mental and spiritual benefits of nature. Finland’s right to roam, or Everyman’s Right, has historical roots in customary rights of way and was formalised by a key court case in 1920, where a forager, Ilma Lindgren, successfully defended her rights of access to pick wild berries against a landowner. Britain is currently ranked at the bottom for Europe on the nature connectedness network and it has been said that British children spend less time outdoors than the UN-recommended guidelines for prisoners.
There’s a ‘right to roam’ in under 10% of England and when we do have access there are limits to what we can do, with rare rights to swim or cycle, camp or canoe. The only wild camping rights we have in England, on Dartmoor, were just under (a blessedly failed) legal attack from a wealthy landowner.
In 1600, 50% of England was common land. It’s now 3%. So how exactly did this loss of land come about? All British urban dwellers have a rural ancestry and the countryside and our relationship to it is in our DNA. The English peasantry suffered some of the earliest and most brutal land enclosures in Europe and the world, and we probably all carry unacknowledged pain from the ways that the majority classes have been divorced from the land over the decades in this country.
Enclosure describes the legal process through which common rights over land were terminated and converted to the exclusive property and use of a landowner. While parliamentary enclosure (enforced through acts of parliament) could be said to have started in 1709, the loss of rights by the common people began with the Norman Conquest.
Over the course of several centuries, acts of law gradually prohibited forms of subsistence hunting by re-labelling it as illegal poaching, making small-scale farming economically unviable and re-designating former peasants as wage-enslaved industrial workers. It created a tribe of society’s outriders, labelled vagabonds, who were condemned as soon as they existed. In essence, the rich and powerful took away nearly all forms of livelihood from the majority class of peasants, and then immediately criminalised them for their ensuing poverty.
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The existence of common land and the common rights held on them stretches back to before the Anglo-Saxon period. In the past, almost half of the land in England and Wales was common, but now only about 3% of land remains common land. A person who holds common rights, jointly with another or others, is known as a commoner. In the 17th century, most peasant farmers had some level of access to common land, which enabled them to subsist and survive.
The gradual loss of common rights through enclosure often made the lives of the rural majority classes untenable. These rights included pasturage: the right to graze and pasture domesticated animals on common land; estovers: the right to collect fallen wood for repairs or fires; turbary: the right to cut turf for fuel; pannage: the right to turn out your pigs in the woods to scavenge for acorns; common in the soil: the right to extract minerals from the land; and piscary: the right to take fish from stretches of rivers.
Capitalism emerged from the systematic erosion of rural communal rights, practices and lifestyles. These rights weren’t relinquished without many struggles and battles. As enclosures were enacted in a progressive but piecemeal fashion from county to county over several centuries, there was no broad national anti-enclosure movement as such, just smaller localised clashes which were often extremely harshly punished by the local courts.
Henry Hand, Henley Common (2021) by Leah Gordon
Over the centuries, there were many rural rebellions spurred by reactions to enclosure. These gained momentum from the 14th century onward, with famous uprisings including Kett’s Rebellion (1549), which started at the market town of Wymondham in Norfolk when a group of rebels destroyed fences that had been put up by wealthy landowners; the Midland Revolt (1607), which started in Northamptonshire and spread to Leicestershire and Warwickshire; the Western Rising (1626), a series of riots in the south-west of England caused by the disafforestation and sale of royal forests, and enclosure by the new owners; the defiant agrarian socialism of the Digger communities on St George’s Hill, Surrey (1649–50); and the Otmoor Riots (1830), which was a reaction to the enclosure, hedging, ditching, dredging and drainage of Otmoor wetland, which deprived locals of their rights to thousands of acres of common.
It’s important to acknowledge the enduring social outcomes of the enclosures, which as well as creating a new class of industrial factory workers, created a disenfranchised vagabond class divorced from the land and any means of subsistence. Their lives were precarious and dangerous as the government created law after law to make survival almost impossible. The ‘poor laws’ separated families in godawful conditions and led to the creation of workhouses. Friedrich Engels, writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England, saw enclosures as a process that displaced rural workers, transforming them into a class of landless wage labourers which enabled the growth of industrial capitalism.
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But at the same time itinerancy was on the rise and led to a rural exodus to London where many of the urban poor contrived creative and imaginative means of surviving within self-supporting communities. Also it is noticeable that British traditions and rituals are vital in nourishing and preserving marginal histories. Ancient folk rituals in Britain often trace and embody our relationship to the land. These traditions are both corporeal expressions of the reverberations of history and kinetic forms of peoples’ ongoing protection of the rights and benefits that come with a closer relationship with the land.
The modern British working class has its roots among the peasants driven off the land, but the history of enclosure hasn’t been treated as a significant part of a national discourse of history and has never been memorialised anywhere in Britain. This is also of contemporary relevance when considering attacks upon public lands today, which are being sold off by neoliberal governments, while our rights to roam are being eroded, and when, from an environmental perspective, control of land at a more grassroots level could not be more paramount. As we are increasingly aware, the majority, rather than an elite minority, need to have more voice in the future of our environment.
Enclosure was devised and enacted by our own ruling classes, and they continue to benefit from it. This is not only suffered in Britain, as the lessons learned from enclosure in England, Scotland and Wales were swiftly re-enacted in the colonies, to create and sustain the British Empire. The history of British enclosure is essential to understanding the global systems, processes and politics of dispossession and extraction that we are witnessing now all around the world.
During a period of increasing nationalism and fascism it is not enough to reclaim and reassert a silenced British history. But we need to highlight contemporary global landgrabs which are taking place worldwide and we must use this chance to build unity with dispossessed Indigenous people suffering on the front line of global enclosures now.
The short-lived Digger settlements of St George’s Hill, Weybridge, Surrey, where members of the dissident group the Diggers planted beans and vegetables from 1649 to 1650, could be considered the first examples of allotments in England and a radical attempt at reversing the abject losses of the commons. As land available to the poor diminished, the idea of “small field gardens” for the landless was introduced, and from 1908 local authorities had to provide allotments for their communities.
Nationwide allotments are an example of positive strategies to reunite people of all races with the commons. Many other organisations are challenging land rights, access and ownership recognising not only the economic importance of land ownership but also the health and spiritual aspects of connection and access to Britain’s countryside.
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