Land ownership is not a sexy subject. We yawn, our eyes glaze, at the thought of another “who owns Britain?” polemic. So Anna Minton has done us a service with this book. She gives us chapter, verse and the opinions of experts and ordinary folk alike on the creeping privatisation of our towns and cities. And she does so in a lively and compelling manner.

She starts from a perfectly clear position: this is a bad thing. She regards the “regeneration” of Britain’s city centres over the past couple of decades as little more than window-dressing. There is no real regeneration, she says, only fat-cat developers moving in on what was previously the public realm, in order to make money. Some might disagree with this. While it is obvious that a residential “gated community”, which excludes access to anybody who doesn’t live there or have business there, is plainly an antisocial exercise, it is less clear with mega shopping centres such as Liverpool One or London’s Westfield. The whole point about shopping malls is public access. Yet, it is true, as Minton points out, that all is not as it seems. These centres have their own private security guards and the routes along which you stroll are not public streets. You are there by permission, not by right. In this way, whole tracts of cities are placed in the hands of private landowners in the name of regeneration. And just as the owners (landed aristocracy or multinational conglomerates) can open these places to the public, so there is nothing stopping them closing them. And to some extent they are selectively closed — to hoodies, say.

The thrust of much of Minton’s writing is that there is no such thing as a “trickle-down” of wealth to the local community, either from such shopping centres or from a financial centre such as Canary Wharf (also a private fiefdom). All you get, she says, is an ever-starker juxtaposition of rich and poor. She sees these enclaves of private capital as cuckoos in the nest of local communities, elbowing them out rather than inviting them in. Furthermore, she contends that these privately owned chunks of our cities serve only to make us all more timorous, more crime-fearing, in the public realm that is left. Her clarion call is for a revival of true civic values, a real public sector.

All of which is fine, but would Liverpool’s centre have been rebuilt at all without private capital and everything it brings? No — it would still be a basket case. There’s the ideal world, and then there’s the real world, and Minton sometimes spends too much time in the former at the expense of the latter. But her book is thought-provoking nonetheless, and I recommend it.

Ground Control by Anna Minton
Penguin £9.99 pp304

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