How public land has been stolen from us

Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.

"With his carefully crafted and meticulously researched study, he has made an essential contribution to our understanding of politics and government in modern Britain." - Financial Times

"If you're someone who's interested in Britain - and I mean Britain tout court: the whole 80,823 square miles of its physical existence - then this is a book you must read" - Guardian

"Brett Christophers' new book The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Land in Neoliberal Britain is eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. Its subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker." - The Enlightened Economist

"Brett Christophers's The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain towers with empirical and argumentative force." - Orion Magazine

"A stunning work of scholarship." - Orion Magazine

"If you're interested in Britain, you must read this painstaking survey of land privatisation since the Thatcher era." - Guardian

"Christophers is writing in the tradition of great historians such as R. H. Tawney and E. P. Thompson..." - Journal of Modern History