England has played a central role in the origins of racial capitalism and colonialism across Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and the British Empire. To repair and rebuild in apocalyptic times, we need to get more specific about histories of dispossession on these lands; histories that are not only entangled with dispossession across the world, but have themselves been subject to erasure. We refer to these as enclosures.

The story often told about the English enclosure movement is that of a centuries-long transition from the open fields system, where land owned by a manorial lord was also held in common, or communally managed, to the "green and pleasant" or rather unpleasant land we recognise today as fields marked by hedges and fences. This commodification of land forced commoners to move to industrialising cities to become workers, to sell their labour in the production of capitalism and colonialism in return for a meager wage. 

This isn't a complete story. In the last 40 years, 'new protest historians' have dug up much more evidence for the commons. Thanks to them, we can see the enclosure of land — through illegal-informal-piecemeal acts of boundary making formal-legal-parliamentary acts — upended entire ways of life; enclaves of democratic negotiation over land use; and longstanding cultural and economic practices. Held in embodied memory, these customary practices varied from the fenlands of the east to the temperate rainforests of the west; and also from village to village. Once so strong they could be considered rights, these customs were systematically targeted through ideological campaigns and nationwide surveys. Some elites even likened commoners to savages and compared them to Indigenous peoples abroad. Some extracted and abstracted commoners' embodied knowledge of the land into pamphlets for landowners to exercise greater managerial control over their land work, although this usually failed. Their experiences were written out of court records and obscured by early land registration systems. In tandem with the denial of their autonomy and mobility, early economists were constructing so-called "free" market ideological models that make the basis of abstract economic thought still crudely cited by governments today.  

England's so-called 'internal colonialism' was as critical for enabling the development of capitalism and alienation from land as the British imperial project. But unlike in many states shaped by British imperial and colonial rule, we don't learn about it in schools, and compared to major events in British history, the politics of landownership is rarely cited in political discourse. Compare "enclosure" to the Magna Carta, to the Great Wars, or the Holocaust, and you'll get a handful of references in parliamentary Hansard records over the past century. Compare the National Curriculum in England and Wales to Ireland, where young people learn about British colonial rule, or to Scotland, where they learn about the Highland Clearances. It was probably due to the standardisation under Thatcher's privatising government that state teachers in England lost a degree of freedom to teach about dispossession here. The early marketisation of universities was at the time likened to Henry VII's dissolution of the monasteries. Now both systems of education are experiencing the early stages of collapse. While memory culture and associated campaigning has led to the Scottish Land Commission, and in Ireland, rich cultural heritage, and its highest politicians issuing solidarities with Palestinians subject to genocidal colonial apartheid under the Israeli regime, English land reform falls far behind, and our statesmen remain mute as blood drips from their hands. 

On Turtle Island, the settler colonial state of Canada has, in the reckoning of its genocidal residential school system, instituted some reforms to education that engage with the trauma of residential schools in a longer history of dispossession, as well as incorporating First Nations' ways of knowing into the curriculum. Young people are receiving some of the most progressive state education seen in the heart of empire, with cultural if not political impacts that fall short of Land Back. England is behind. We cannot access, let alone cite, our own histories of dispossession. We cannot grieve for what has been lost, for we do not know. In these spaces of unknowing, there is a risk we will only reproduce whiteness, a narrow national identity, and settler power relations. How can we truly repair if we cannot conceptualise the loss of our own relationships to land?

The enclosure of land in England is intimately tied to processes of dispossession experienced by Indigenous people and settler populations across the world. Increasingly, there are ways to understand how these memories are connected, and therefore shouldn't be treated in competition. (Those speaking about this are often deplatformed; their speech and writings banned by colonial states like Germany.) But even with decolonial scholarship and anti-colonial spaces, even in discussions about reparations, the enclosures are often not addressed. There is still an opportunity to repair our complicit property culture, by specifying our histories and their intimacies with others. 

The suppression of memory in England is part of the enclosure of our common lands. It has been, since the beginning of the English enclosure movement, which saw both illegal-informal, formal-legal acts of enclosure. We can understand this epistemic enclosure, or the enclosure of knowledge about enclosure, in two ways:

First, in the development of land registration infrastructure, where titles to land are held in a centralised state owned land registry, obscuring all other users of land. This was first developed by British colonisers in South Australia, then British Columbia, then returned to England and formalised with the Land Registration Act 1925. Since, political discourse around land ownership has declined.

Second, in the development of laws of trespass, which in each instantiation denies us access to land and to knowledge of land, our land relations, and relationships with one another. While trespass was once understood as a generalised harm to someone's body or their relationships with land, including sexual assault or the diversion of a river, it has become progressively spatialised, and is almost always synonymous with harms to someone's property, proven by title. Challengers of enclosure deemed "trespassers" have resisted private property culture and its mutations over time and space: from the Levellers and Diggers who uprooted material law, to students who build encampments in solidarity with Palestinians, bear witness to their story and struggle, speak out against universities whose investment portfolios drip with blood.

In these two processes, and many others, we need to understand that enclosure is continuous. In other words, customary rights to use land are still undermined or erased by property law and culture. We see enclosure in the private sale of public land, the biggest privatisation in British history. We see enclosure in public space protection orders which narrowly define who the "public" is and undermine democratic processes. We see enclosure in the recent Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, deliberately designed to further criminalise nomadic ways of life practiced by Gypsy, Romani and Traveller communities; skirt around the Vagrancy Act; and criminalise those on the frontlines of contesting fossil fuel infrastructure. We see enclosure in recent cases such as Alexander Darwall's legal battle to outlaw the right to wild camp on Dartmoor National Park and the defunding of National Park Authorities. Enclosure is the continuous denial of customary rights, but it is also the capitalist-colonial machine arming Israel and our 'special' relationship to the US military industrial complex.

Britain's complicity in racial capitalism, settler colonial regimes, genocide and climate breakdown is coming back to bite it. Alongside the loss of biodiversity in these lands, English property culture has tried to erode our social relations and culture, and is responsible for the decline in living standards and cuts to social services. This was inevitable, as these processes have never been constrained by national borders, a myth designed to evade accountability for extraction and exploitation. Yet we are still tasked with the creation of a true homeland across England's borderings: the export of this relatively new property culture. 

The story of enclosure is therefore vital for internationalism in England and elsewhere. To specify dispossession here also means specifying our responsibility for ensuring true reparation and repatriation, and how to cultivate relationships to our lands here.

Unlike other connected radical histories, like the Suffragettes, the Bengali squatters movement, or the Peterloo Massacre, where material culture such as pamphlets, ephemera and monuments are often displayed, you won't find the word "enclosure" referenced in more permanent spaces of political education like the People's History Museum. How do we tell ongoing (hi)stories of enclosure without material culture, or rather, when that material culture is the landscape itself; the fabric of our cities; institutional records while we hold a void in our memories?

We are dreaming of the Museum of Enclosure as a political education project that is itself itinerant. We want to continue exploring how knowledge and memory, and land and property, can be cultivated in common. Tracing England's highways and country roads, its industrial and inhabited canals, we hope to connect with local experts and genealogists who know the records, archives and stories we have left; the students and workers who know the land and what it could be. — March 2025 

Sources linked in-text here:
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/QKrUgQ1r6qVTeDHsiN8NH+kLfU0PfhFQkiPepbqp2WU/embed/

The Museum of Enclosure sprouted in 2024, but its roots have been nurtured by generations of storytelling and resistance to dispossession across borders. These particular commoners met while organising Perpetual Stew, an annual week of programming around land justice and folk knowledge at the House of Annetta in 2023. This was followed by a second Perpetual Stew in 2024, where the first contributions to the Museum were exhibited. In between, the collective has performed memory work, standing in solidarity with Palestinians and nomadic communities on these Isles; offering workshops on queer ecologies and belonging; facilitating an action-reading group and printing zines; and trespassing the land. MoE dreams of a bus and a boat to make space for belonging, despite Britain’s high concentration of rural and urban land ownership.

It is open to all, and welcomes your contributions, now and in the future.
themuseumofenclosure@proton.me

Field trip to the Museum of Memory & Human Rights, Santiago, August 2024

Perpetual Stew II programme, October 2024

Collective call, September 2024

Collective debrief on planning weekend using donated limes, House of Annetta, March 2024

NBTA rally against CRT increases in mooring fees, London, March 2024

Lyrics to 'Bread and Roses' and morris choreography notes used to compose a folk song for Perpetual Stew, August 2023

Perpetual Stew team around the big pot, House of Annetta, September 2023

Animals trespassing, Sussex, November 2023

Rural Sisters project trip, January 2024

Field trip to the Museum of Homelessness (London), June 2024

Museum of Enclosure exhibition programme, October 2024

Cat surveying the Colonial Lives of Property zine making workshop, HoA, July 2024

Zine cover, October 2024

Queer Ecologies workshop, London, July 2024

Queer Ecologies workshop, London, July 2024

How have you experienced enclosure, or been shaped by English property culture and dispossession?

If the Museum of Enclosure was a bus or narrowboat, how would you like to interact with it? How would you be represented in place?

Email us, set up a call, or sign up to our forthcoming newsletter at themuseumofenclosure@proton.me

Writing the Perpetual Stew folk song on the HoA windows, August 2023

Field trip to the Chinese-Canadian Museum, March 2025

Field trip to the Museum of Vancouver, March 2025

Field trip to the People's History Museum, Manchester, July 2024