Strix
Poor Man's Matto Grosso HE elderly chairman consulted his watch (I use the verb advisedly, for he did everything in a punctilious and deliberate way), then rapped with some blunt instrument upon his table. A hush, broken only by the bat- like ululation of a hearing aid, fell upon the Parish Hall.
'We do not smoke,' said the chairman with mild severity, 'on these occasions.'
We wondered, disconsolately, why not.
The chairman was in fact an inspector, appointed by the Minister of Housing and Local Government to conduct a Public Local Inquiry. The origins of this inquiry were, briefly, as follows : During the last war part of Crowsfoot Common (which is not its real name) was requisitioned and a hutted camp was built on it. After the war some of the huts were removed, but in those that remained squatters established themselves at the height of the housing shortage. This fait accompli led to the camp being given the status of a sort of temporary housing estate, administered, with rather an ill grace, by the Rural District Council. There are still more than sixty families in this desolate rural slum.
For some at least of these, and for other families on their waiting list, the RDC needed to build some proper houses in the neighbourhood. It occurred to them that there was a lot to be said for building these houses on the site of the camp. This was already equipped with sewerage works, main water, electricity and so on, which would result in a saving of about £5,000 on the scheme; the unsightly huts, which otherwise were likely to remain an eyesore for an indefinite period, would be got rid of, and no inroads would be made on agricultural land. In the end the • RDC produced a plan to acquire fifteen acres of Crowsfoot Common—about a tenth of its total area— for housing purposes; they undertook to remove all the huts and to recompense the commoners by buying and adding to the common fifteen acres of woodland adjoining it. ever managed to establish themselves on it, and it offers no grazing nor even any of the sort of open spaces which people like to picnic on at weekends. But it is, or was, a wild, natural place, and the fact that most of its surface was inaccessible to those who had rights of access did not lessen my respect for their determination to keep it as it always had been.
As the inquiry droned on, I found myself speculating about the future of common land. There are thought to be some 1,500,000 acres of it in the British Isles, over which several different sorts of common and manorial rights are—theoreti- cally—exercised. I say 'theoretically' because a lot of these rights are no longer exercised. The functional, productive side of common land, which in almost all cases was its original raison d'être, has fallen largely into desuetude. and often only its 'amenity value,' based on the public's right of access, sur- vives as a benefit to the community.
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An open space which is neither grazed nor cultivated, and which nobody in particular is responsible for looking after, will become waste. That is what has been happening to a great deal of the 1,500,000 acres of common land. Brambles, gorse, elder, nettles, thistles. ragwort and other useless or worse than useless forms of vegetation are encroaching steadily; and the case for regarding all common land as sacrosanct per se is, at a time when agricultural land is being sequestered at the rate of nearly 1,000 acres a week, becoming harder and harder to argue on any save sentimental grounds.
Both the present Government and its predecessors have given vague indications that they intend to do something about common land. In 1956 the emergency powers under which the Ministry of Agriculture holds on requisition some 7,000 acres which were cleared and cultivated during the war are not going to be renewed, and common rights over this land will be re-established. Before handing the land back the Ministry is under an obligation to restore the land to its original state, which in practice will mean putting it down to grass. What is going to happen to this land? Large sums of public money have been spent on making it productive. Little if any of it can have paid back the capital invested in it; and even if it had, is it right that it should be taken out of produc- tion and put down, as it were, to brambles and ragwort?
This knotty problem will pear a different aspect wherever it poses itself; each case will be affected by the interplay of local traditions and local personalities. In some cases it may be possible for the Lord of the. Manor. by following a somewhat complex procedure, to get the agreement of the commoners to an alteration—similar to that proposed at Crowsfoot Common—in the boundaries of the common, so that the land given up by the Ministry can go on being farmed; in others the local people might agree among them- selves to the fencing of the derequisitioned land, so that it can be grazed or planted with trees.
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