Nick Hayes on Hardwick Hall and the Right to Roam — SkimNews
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- Nick Hayes, co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign and author of The Book of Trespass, discusses his home community in South Oxfordshire and frames the situation with the line 'We have been dispossessed', centering a land-rights argument.
- Hardwick Hall, on the banks of the Thames and long owned by the Rose family, has been 'taken back by the people,' with Hayes casting the reclamation as a 'peaceful revolution' linked to wider debates about who owns the English countryside.
Why it matters: A prominent land-reform advocate putting his own neighborhood forward as a model reframes the trespass debate from abstract policy into a lived example — turning private aristocratic estates into a live test case for what community-led reclamation looks like in practice.
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