• Singapore buys a bit of British democratic history

Apropos of nothing in particular, this little snippet of news...

The government of Singapore has built up a 3 per cent stake in British
Land, the FTSE 100 property group that has seen its market value dive
with the rest of the UK property sector.

...prompted me to mention something that many might not know and that I discovered while researching the history of things that could loosely be linked to community land trusts or mutual housing schemes that I am working on elsewhere.

British Land plc is the successor of something called the National Freehold Land Society, which was founded by nineteenth century liberals, foremost amongst them Richard Cobden and John Bright, as a way of subverting the restriction that only those with freehold property had the vote. They would club together, buy up swathes of land around inner cities and parcel it off to households at a minimum nominal value of the £50 you had to be worth in land to vote.

Much of the familiar nineteenth century townscape of Britain was developed by this and other temporary building societies and similar vehicles, including a less successful one established by the Tories that I think also has a successor plc today (Slough Estates maybe?).

Quite often, if you see streets where every other house is of a slightly different nineteenth century design you will find that many of these were built by these mutuals. Members would get allocated their land and then the whole mutual would save money until they could afford to build a house, then the whole process would start again until all the members were housed.