Guy Shrubsole

Guy Shrubsole is a writer and environmental campaigner, and a campaigner at Friends of the Earth. In 2015 he co-founded the Who Owns England? project with programmer and data analyst Anna Powell-Smith, aiming to build "the most comprehensive public map of land ownership in England: a modern Domesday" (whoownsengland.org).

In a 2021 post on the project's blog, later updated, Shrubsole turned his attention to Dartmoor, writing that the moor "has always had a special place" in his heart since he took part in the Ten Tors challenge as a teenager. Having since moved to Devon, on the outskirts of the National Park, he mapped Dartmoor's freehold landowners alongside its common land and grazing rights, noting that "owning a freehold on Dartmoor is not quite as straightforward as owning land in most other places." The post also examines the Blachford Estate's legal challenge to the right to wild camp on the moor.

His books cover the same territory at greater length: Who Owns England? (2019) set out the history of English land ownership; The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022) uncovered the country's surviving temperate rainforest; and The Lie of the Land (2024), winner of the 2025 Wainwright Prize for Conservation, examined how the UK's landowning elite manage, or fail to manage, the countryside.

Read his Dartmoor research: Who owns Dartmoor? on whoownsengland.org.

Books on this site:

• Who Owns England? (2019)
• The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022)
• The Lie of the Land (2024)