The question posed by the title of this crucial book has, for nearly a thousand years, been one that as a nation we have mostly been too cowed or too polite to ask. Since the Domesday Book set the standard for a comprehensive land ownership survey – in part so the conqueror could hoover up some of the choicest millions of acres for the crown and its appetite for the hunt – England has never properly addressed the issue. The last major attempt at land reform, which involved a census of ownership, was attempted by the Liberal government of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in 1909; it led to constitutional crisis, neutered proposals and partial data. One of the most telling facts in Guy Shrubsole’s book is the revelation that the Land Registry – a body that George Osborne wanted to privatise – possesses details of the ownership of only 83% of England’s green and pleasant plot. Knowledge of the other 17% remains out of bounds even to parliament.

Secrecy about ownership has become deliberately entwined with “an Englishman’s home is his castle” nonsense. That particular phrase has less weight when you consider that only 5% of English land is owned by householders, while 18%, by Shrubsole’s calculations, is in the control of corporate structures and offshore companies, many of them opaque. In France, you can pitch up at your local town hall and ask to see, free of charge, a map of who owns what in your neighbourhood. In England such a request carries a fee and is often frustrated by vague legal niceties around compulsory registration. For an individual to discover all that is known about land ownership in England would cost more than £72m.

There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour. An environmental campaigner for Friends of the Earth, he has used multiple freedom of information requests and a large network of crowdsourced informants and number crunchers to build up a credible picture of the pattern and detail of who owns what. Even so, he has come up against plenty of virtual Keep Out and No Trespassing signs, and some of his findings necessarily rely on best guesswork.

The land monopolist has only to sit and watch his property multiplying in value, without effort or contribution Winston Churchill, 1909

Shrubsole became obsessed with the great unspoken question in part because of a walking knowledge of the countryside in which he grew up. He was born in Newbury in Berkshire and was 10 years old when the eco-warrior protests about the town’s bypass became a national news story in 1996. His parents kept some beehives in the woodland of the vast Sutton estate through which the bypass would run. Seeing first-hand as a boy how the bee population was threatened not only by motorways but also by the pesticides produced at the local Bayer plant, he learned to question the received wisdom that ancient barons, such as Sir Richard Sutton, who traced his lineage back to the time of the Domesday Book, were best thought of as duty-bound custodians of the landscape.

West Berkshire was a perfect microcosm of many of the issues this book seeks to address. We might like to imagine that mass trespass battles over “right to roam” were fought and won in the 1930s onwards. It remains the case, however, that only 10% of land in England is open access, and that proportion shrinks to 1.5% in Berkshire. Shrubsole could see this on Sunday walks. There was, for a start, a significant amount of off-limits MoD land, not least at Greenham Common; but far more significant was the land held by corporate family structures, including the Yattendon estate, 9,000 acres owned by the Iliffe family, much of it planted to supply 80,000 Christmas trees annually; or the Englefield estate, 14,000 acres in the prime M4 corridor owned since the 18th century by the Benyon family (which also owns De Beauvoir Town in north London).

The latter calls into question other myths around land ownership in this country. One is that the “landed interest” is a neutered force in our politics, undone by death duties and socialism. Richard Benyon, current owner of Englefield (and in receipt of £278,180 taxpayer-funded farm subsidies), is the richest of the current crop of Conservative MPs with estimated wealth of £110m. Another competitor for that title is Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Enle-Erle Drax, who sits in the Commons for South Dorset. Drax, an ardent Brexiter, owns the 7,000-acre Charborough estate, originally established with profits from the sugar and slave trades. The estate is bounded by the longest wall in England, made up of 2m bricks; the public get to look beyond the wall for two days a year, when tea and cake is served to locals. In campaigning for Brexit, Richard Drax (as he judiciously calls himself) argued a strong anti-immigration line, stating: “I believe, as do many of my constituents, that this country is full.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Englefield House, which has been in the Benyon family since the 18th century. Photograph: Joan Wakeham/Rex/Shutterstock

The impression that we are a small and overcrowded island, that property is scarce and worth a lifetime’s work and debt to come by, that a little patch of suburban garden should reasonably be the aspiration of any true-born Englishman, has long been advanced by politicians of different stripes and for different reasons. You can rest assured, however, that the nation does not look very crowded from the Palladian windows of Englefield House or from Drax’s mullioned pile at Purbeck. Two-thirds of land in the UK as a whole – 40m acres – is owned by 0.36% of the population; 24m families, meanwhile, share the “urban plot” of 3m acres. The notion of the country being “full” is a political fantasy.

When once asked how young entrepreneurs might succeed in Britain, the late Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor (owner of 131,000 acres, including much of London’s Belgravia and central Liverpool), observed, drily, that they should “make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. Though Shrubsole estimates that the recent sell-off of ancestral lands to the “new money” of hedge-funders and oligarchs accounts for perhaps 17% of the total in England, 30% rests in the hands of the feudal Norman “cousinhood”, whose offspring have until recently preserved their birthright with a Downton-esque doggedness.

It is fascinating to be reminded that it was Winston Churchill, a Marlborough born, of course, at Blenheim Palace, who best articulated the iniquities of that inheritance. Shrubsole provides a compelling history of the challenges to land ownership of the last century or so, beginning with Churchill’s 1909 book The People’s Rights. The relevant pages of that title might stand as a manifesto for all of the imbalances of our economy in the decades that have followed. “Land is by far the greatest of the monopolies,” Churchill argued, “… the land monopolist has only to sit and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part; and that is justice!”

The 1909 “People’s Budget” argued for a 20% land tax to be levied on future unearned increase in land values. The hundred-odd years war that budget set in train, between the landed and their tenants, had its moments of egalitarian triumph – the advance of the National Trust, for example – but in recent decades with the growth of offshore investment vehicles and the unchecked rise in wealth of the 1%, the balance has turned back towards the landowners.

Who owns the country? The secretive companies hoarding England's land Read more

You could see the results of that failed campaign, as Shrubsole convincingly does, as the roots of many of our contemporary difficulties – “the housing crisis is a land crisis”. The laundered cash that has poured into London property, much of which lies empty, has been facilitated by a taxation system that largely ignores the productive and commercial value of land. In the shires, there is a radical shortage of building plots and a critical housing problem, while legacy landowners are subsidised to exploit the estates granted to them when the country’s entire population was equal to that of present-day Greater Manchester.

Shrubsole ends his fine inquiry into these issues with a 10-point prospectus as to how this millennium-long problem might be brought up to date, and how our land could be made to work productively and healthily for us all. This ranges from obvious political measures to prevent landowners hoarding land and leaving property empty to a “public register of trusts” that would close loopholes around inheritance tax; also included are the need to reinvigorate buried pieces of legislation such as everyone’s “statutory right to an allotment” (we devote 10 times more land to golf courses). Any reform must begin, however, he argues, with a determined end to the secrecy around ownership. His book makes a good start. If we really want to “take back control” we might start by thinking about the ways we share out the nation’s primary sovereign resource, “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”.

• Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole is published by William Collins (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99