The Land is Ours

Not to be confused with This Is Our Land.

The Land is Ours is a British land rights campaign advocating access to the land, its resources, and the planning processes set up in 1995 by George Monbiot and others.

Their first campaign was the occupation of the disused Wisley Airfield in Surrey by 400 people in 1995, from which there was a live broadcast on the BBC's Newsnight programme. Nearby St. George's Hill is symbolically significant as the site of a 1649 protest, when the Diggers planted vegetables on the common land there.

Throughout the summer of 1996, the group set up Pure Genius!!, an eco-village on a derelict former distillery site owned by Guinness in Wandsworth, London. The squatted community was evicted the day before the London Wildlife Trust were meeting to officially designate it as a conservation site containing many species of flowers and birds classed as extremely rare in London.

On 1 April 1999, on the 350th anniversary of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers' occupation of the same hill, The Land Is Ours organised a rally, then occupied land at St. Georges Hill near Weybridge, Surrey.

In April 2004, The Land Is Ours occupied Castell Henllys, a tourist site with reconstructed Iron Age roundhouses, in protest at Pembrokeshire Coast National Park's decision to demolish That Roundhouse at nearby Brithdir Mawr.

In 2009, a group inspired by The Land Is Ours opened Kew Bridge Eco Village, a squat on land owned by property developers St George; this was evicted on 27 May 2010.

External links

• The Land is Ours website
• Diggers 350 is the UK Squatting and Land Rights email information and discussion service
• The Story of the Land on George Monbiot's website.
• Video from Pure Genius campaign