Hayes's 'Medicine Tree' tells of Toad Hall estate charity — SkimNews
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- The Hardwick estate in South Oxfordshire, owned by the Rose family for generations and the real-life inspiration for Mr Toad's Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows, is being converted into a charity run by its roughly 90 tenants, potentially England's first community-owned estate.
- The Rose heirs decided to relinquish the estate after learning their family wealth was derived from colonial extraction and exploitation in North America, according to Hayes.
- Right to Roam, co-founded by Hayes and Guy Shrubsole in 2020 to push for responsible access to land, has held more than 15 peaceful mass trespasses and fought a court battle over wild camping rights on Dartmoor.
- The campaign targets the 92% of land in England and Wales that is currently excluded from public access.
- Hayes argues England's land culture was lost through 'a very steady letting of England's veins' over 2,000 years: Christianity displaced animism, then enclosure and the agricultural and industrial revolutions eroded myth and folklore.
- The Medicine Tree draws on Indigenous examples — including New Zealand's legal recognition of the Whanganui River as a person — to argue for a recreated, non-nationalist English land culture, contrasting poplar trees that symbolised community in both Indigenous and pre-modern European societies.
- Hayes lives on a Thames barge because no artist can afford housing in the London commuter belt; the estate's 'troll bridge' is a privately owned toll bridge that Hayes estimates enriches its owner-family by more than £1m a year.
Why it matters: If completed, the Hardwick conversion would be the first time an aristocratic estate enriched by colonial extraction has been voluntarily handed to its tenant community, offering a template that contradicts England's entrenched assumption that large private estates are normal and desirable. Right to Roam's parallel push to open the 92% of excluded land reframes the country's exclusionary land-ownership system as a live political question rather than settled tradition.
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