Right to Roam: The Movement that Saved England
“The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by people who actually do run the country… The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country…”
So says the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker in the timeless BBC comedy, Yes, Prime Minister.
If you were given the challenge of identifying the class of an Englishman simply by the paper they read, chances are, you would succeed 90% of the time. Newspapers have become something of a totem; not just of political sensibilities, but of the stratified society that makes up England. It is not uncommon to be derided for reading The Sun, or being a member of the “Guardian-reading… wokerati.” As then Home Secretary Suella Braverman had put it.
So the question is, which paper do you read?
There is a version of England where the answer to that question would determine where you may and may not pass, and for the majority of us, it would not be very far at all. This is a freedom that is not listed in the European Convention on Human Rights, but is so fundamental that you rarely think about it: the Right to Roam.
For the longest time, this right did not need to be written down at all. But as with all freedoms, when they are challenged by the few, they must be asserted by the many.
In the Middle Ages, the tenants of a Lord had rights to use particular land the Lord had in his custody. This ‘Common Land’ was used for mowing, fishing, and most usually, taking animals to pasture. With the advent of capitalism and the increasing use of land as a commodity, came the Enclosure movement, which saw vast swathes of previously Common Land, privatised. Many credit the Enclosures of land with the heralding of the British Agricultural Revolution, but as productivity soared, so too were the freedoms to use land diminished.
As the urban population of Victorian England boomed, walking through the countryside became an attractive respite from the fumes that engulfed the cities. Even then, after six million acres of land had been Enclosed by acts of parliament, it was still becoming more difficult to access the countryside freely. It was becoming clear that soon, only those who owned the country are the ones who would ever have access to it.
The Ramblers were founded in 1935, and served as the culmination of the myriad of campaign groups that sprang up in support of the right to roam from the 1800s. This movement pushed back against an unrelenting force that had been stripping commoners of their ancient rights for hundreds of years, and resulted in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, of 2000.
It is this movement that you can credit for the pleasure of roaming freely in your own country. It is this movement that you can credit for ensuring that the earth and its bounty are not solely the preserve of those who read The Financial Times. And it is this movement, that I credit my fascination with MannerPunk. For perhaps the greatest threats to the preservation of a society as stratified as ours, is the freedom to gather, as well as the freedom to roam. Because on that Common, we all assert our claim to live in and be a part of this country as much as anyone else. It is the manifestation of both our individual and collective stakes in society. The Chartists knew this when they assembled on Kennington Common in 1848.
So the next time you find yourself in a national park, or in any of the many commons that dot the landscape, you become part of a long established tradition that stands in the face of those who would tell you that “you don’t belong here.” And you thwart the ambitions of those that would say “you don’t matter.” The Commons are places where pathological social structures break down, old freedoms are rediscovered, and the individual is unconstrained; and if you ask me, represents the highest ideal MannerPunk is meant to pursue and could ever hope to embody.