THE WALLS AROUND US

Nick Hayes tells a story of trespass that reveals deep truths about our society. This is a challenging book – it tackles lazy assumptions of race, class and the pre-ordained power of those with the luck to be born into land-owning. His digging into the origins of the vast acres from which we are excluded finds owners who have inherited the wealth, but not the shame, of slave-owners and land-clearers – yet have managed to spin that into an entitlement that tries to keep us from 90% of the land and 93% of the waterways.

English exceptionalism is an ugly hangover of Empire, when many of the walls that