Can i buy common land

UK, remember your settings and improve government services. We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Find out if a claim of ownership by adverse possession can be made on common land and town or village greens, what effect it will have on the land and whether a claim can be opposed.

A squatter can be registered as the owner of common land or town or village greens TVGs by adverse possession of the land if the:. See the Land Registry guide for more information. See section 29 of the Commons Act and section 12 of the Inclosure Act for more details.

You may, however, be able to legally claim adverse possession of a TVG to carry out improvements or safety works, such as mowing the grass or removing unsafe trees. Talk to your legal adviser for more information. An owner of common land or a TVG recorded by the Land Registry can oppose a claim of adverse possession, unless the squatter can establish one of 3 conditions:.

See Land Registration Act schedule 6, paragraph 5 for more details. This guide is not a statement of law and The National Archives cannot provide legal advice or offer any legal interpretation of the information contained in the records.

Those entitled to exercise such rights were called commoners. It is a popular misconception that common land is land owned by the general public and to which everyone has unrestricted right of access. All common land is private property, whether the owner is an individual or a corporation. Historically, the owner of the common was normally the lord of the manor.

Today many commons are owned by local authorities, the National Trust and other bodies for the public benefit, but not all commons offer total access to all comers. These rights related to natural produce, not to crops or commercial exploitation of the land. They were almost always subject to limitations on quantities usually enough for the domestic needs of the commoner and sometimes subject to seasonal restrictions such as during game-breeding periods.

In modern times, rights have been defined in less tangible terms, including access to light, air, recreation and so on. This section describes how you can search for records at The National Archives and in which sets of records it might be worth focussing your searches. Other useful record series and departments are highlighted in sections 5 to 9 of this guide. Searches begin in our catalogue , which contains short descriptions of the records and a document reference for each — you will need the document reference to see the record itself.

You can search the catalogue using keywords and dates. Use the advanced search option or the series searches to restrict your search results to records of a specific government department and its predecessors — departments are identified by a letter code see section 4.

Searches with the following keywords will return catalogue results — combine any of these terms with a place name county, city, town, district, parish to hone your results:. Within the MAF department is a division of records of land tenure, enclosure copyhold and tithes, and land use and improvement. This division contains many of the primary series for records of common land, including those listed below.

There are also some papers about commons among the records of the Treasury Solicitor TS. Use the following keyword combinations to search our catalogue for records of common land surveys:. Several surveys of common lands were made for Parliament. The most important of the surveys was the so-called Common Lands Census of which was published as House of Commons Sessional Papers lii The original returns submitted for this survey are among the records in series OS 25 , an Ordnance Survey series split into seven pieces by county in our catalogue.

The maps annexed to these returns are very fragile and will not be available until conservation work has been carried out. You may find information about common land in manorial records. The National Archives holds large quantities of records, covering many centuries, relating to the estates of the Crown as well as some records of privately-owned manors submitted as evidence in equity proceedings, particularly in the Court of Chancery.

The Manorial Documents Register , maintained by The National Archives, records the whereabouts of manorial records excluding title deeds. For more advice, see our guide to Manorial documents and lordships and how to use the Manorial Documents Register. Many areas of common land were requisitioned for agricultural or military use during the Second World War.

The records of the Forestry Commission include many references to common lands in forests. Not until the passing of the New Forest Act were maps made to show the lands subject to common rights. Using similar arguments, groups such as the Connecticut-based Equity Trust have dedicated the "social increment" in property values--the increase in land prices as a neighborhood recovers from blight, or a small town grows--to social purposes.

For example, the portion of a home's sale price that is due to the increase in land values rather than housing construction costs is used to subsidize the purchase price for the next homeowner. Vacant lots, old cemeteries and partially buried urban streams raise a host of questions about managing urban landscapes as commons.

Groups seeking to reclaim or use such incidental urban open spaces must often persuade private owners to let them use and help to maintain the land. Some geographers and planners have remapped cities' neglected, and in practice often "unowned," open spaces.

Groups such as the Waterways Restoration Institute in Berkeley, California, have built on this research to help low-income city residents uncover and restore forgotten streams and their banks, turning them from neighborhood eyesores into neighborhood treasures.

The process increases residents' appreciation of the interdependence between the city and nature, which they often think of as exclusively suburban or rural. For the elderly, single-parent households and many low-income families, detached single-family housing is either inappropriate or priced beyond reach.

Yet traditional land use regulations, grounded partly in concerns about property values, favor only single-family housing.

Advocates of privatization, in the U. Organizations serving the homeless, such as San Francisco's HomeBase, are seeing this argument applied even to traditionally public spaces such as doorways, parks and bus benches. To discourage the homeless from occupying these spaces, some local businesses and neighbors support regulations that convert them into quasi-private property. Yet in all these settings, some researchers and practitioners have also proposed to manage the housing stock as a whole as a form of common property, both to meet needs not met by single-family detached housing and to encourage neighborhood reinvestment.

In the U. Many home and business owners who oppose these land uses in interviews, expecting them to depress property values, are ironically unaware that their neighborhoods already contain some of this alternative housing. For each base closed, the federal government offers planning funds to a single organization. That organization must represent the entire local community affected by the base closing, from public to private interests and across local political jurisdictions. Researchers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Bernard Frieden are now studying the way that communities around these bases, which often include very diverse interests, are being forced to create at least temporary "commons" structures to receive federal grants.

Few bases have been all the way through the conversion process yet, so it remains to be seen whether these temporary structures will be converted for permanent land ownership or management. In the Oakland-San Francisco area, however, the Earth Island Institute's Carl Anthony and others on the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission consciously considered long-term group or community ownership of some base lands as a way to meet regional needs for housing, open space and jobs.

Alice E. Ingerson, director of publications at the Lincoln Institute, earned her Ph. William A. Carol M. Skip to main content. User Log In Create Account. Urban Land as Common Property. What Makes a Successful Commons? Pros and Cons of Common Property Most scholars who have written about common property have seen commoners as political and economic underdogs.

New Commons A few experimental forms of land ownership and management in the U. Sidebars Land Trusts and Limited-Equity Cooperatives Much of land's market value depends on whether it contains important natural resources, is located in a thriving community, or has access to services and infrastructure provided by government.

Incidental Open Spaces Vacant lots, old cemeteries and partially buried urban streams raise a host of questions about managing urban landscapes as commons. Housing For the elderly, single-parent households and many low-income families, detached single-family housing is either inappropriate or priced beyond reach.