Who Owns the View?

Back in Ayton a temperature inversion looked highly likely. So a pedal up Park Nab was indeed well rewarded. A clear autumn morning, with cloud filling the vale and two silver birches shivering in the heather.

You may well wonder who owns the view. The answer is harder to find than the cycle up here, for the ground beneath our feet has had its owners kept secret since the Domesday Book.

Today the HM Land Registry, or HMLR, charges £7 for each title search. Mapping 95% of the countryside would cost almost £12 million, a sum to make any Treasury official reach for the smelling salts, and roughly 10% of the land remains unregistered.¹Land Registry, Hm. 2026. “Consultation: Future of Access to HM Land Registry Information,” GOV.UK <https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/future-of-access-to-hm-land-registry-information/consultation-future-of-access-to-hm-land-registry-information>²Guy. 2026. “Centuries of Secrecy about Who Owns Our Land Could Soon End – but Only If You Can Help,” Who Owns England? <https://whoownsengland.org/2026/10/27/centuries-of-secrecy-about-who-owns-our-land-could-soon-end-but-only-if-you-can-help/>

But times are a-changin’. A government consultation proposes a free, open dataset of land holdings of 0.5 hectares or larger. That threshold opens 94.5% of registered land area to public scrutiny and environmental planning, while screening out 98.4% of single residential homes, so homeowners keep their privacy.

Sweden shows what can be done. Its land registry, Lantmäteriet, has mapped property publicly since 1628. The Swedes treat land data as a public good, use open cadastral geodata to support economic growth, and build the registry into national emergency preparedness and total defence.³“About Lantmäteriet.” 2023. Lantmateriet.Se. <https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/about-lantmateriet/>

Opening HMLR’s records is long overdue. Land information released from behind a paywall becomes a public asset for housing and climate resilience, and the privileged lose a long-standing convenience.

The consultation closes on 22 December 2026, and you should take part. The questions are however quite daunting, and one suspects they were written to make you give up.

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  Land Registry, Hm. 2026. “Consultation: Future of Access to HM Land Registry Information,” GOV.UK <https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/future-of-access-to-hm-land-registry-information/consultation-future-of-access-to-hm-land-registry-information> ↩︎
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  Guy. 2026. “Centuries of Secrecy about Who Owns Our Land Could Soon End – but Only If You Can Help,” Who Owns England? <https://whoownsengland.org/2026/10/27/centuries-of-secrecy-about-who-owns-our-land-could-soon-end-but-only-if-you-can-help/> ↩︎
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  “About Lantmäteriet.” 2023. Lantmateriet.Se. <https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/about-lantmateriet/> ↩︎