Who Owns the Land: The copyrighting of our heritage
Fay Godwin
Violations of Rights in Britain Series 2 No.17
All over Britain, land is being taken away from the people who own it, or ruined by planning blight. People are being denied access to land, much of it common land, which they have valued for centuries for its beauty and natural resources. This echoes the past enclosures of the commons, by which land was taken from ordinary people and out of public use by the wealthy and used for sheep farming. Now land is being taken from us for cars, in particular for commercial road traffic. What is more, the money we pay in taxes is being taken away from public transport, health, education and other essential services while a staggering £28 billion is being spent on road building programmes. The government has announced plans to streamline the planning processes, so that there is less chance for us to protest at these violations of our land. Worse still, the Criminal Justice Bill now going through parliament would criminalise civil disobedience and protest.
But the protests will not go away. Despite these threats, battles still rage over Twyford Down and Solsbury Hill where whole communities are up in arms over the consequences of the government’s policy. More controversies lie ahead on the route of the Folkestone to Honiton south coast expressway, including the beautiful Brede Valley near Winchelsea in East Sussex, a High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, where even roads Minister Robert Key foresees ‘heritage and landscape problems’.
At any time the Department of Transport may commandeer the land on which you live to build roads. And if you think of making a photographic or video record of what the DoT do to the land, beware. You could lose all the rest of your property. The only people allowed to use cameras are the faceless security people with their ubiquitous scanners, the police, and to a more limited extent, the accredited press. While all our lives are being permanently documented in an Orwellian manner, whether shopping, visiting museums, or driving our cars, as ordinary citizens it would seem we have no right to document our landscape.
While the police and their private security forces keep a full photographic record of all protesters, the government forces are more and more often preventing photographers from recording the damage to the land, and of course, their assaults on the protesters. Press photographers are endangered by Government demands for their exposed film, so that they are often seen as hostile by the protesters. Freedom of information looks to be further off than ever.
Maggie Lambert, a mature photography student, went to Twyford Down to photograph the stakes in the ground, and various ecological aspects. She and others were prevented from going on land which the DoT did not even own. She was served with an injunction which could have made her liable, with other injunctees, for all the damage and delays caused by the protesters, to the tune of nearly £2 million. She was in fact not a protester herself. For several months she faced the loss of her home and financial ruin. She was supported by the NUJ, and the DoT lost its case, but will surely try again. One of the judges seemed particularly incensed that she was “not even a commissioned member of the press”, that she was taking the pictures for her own purposes. She was in fact the only photographer to be injuncted, and she was coincidentally the only student, and the only woman photographer. “I only wanted to photograph our landscape,” says Ms Lambert.
Apart from confrontations between the DoT and protesters, there are many other ways we are prevented from making a photographic record of our land. Some of our best-loved national institutions show the same worrying trend towards censorship.
Until recently photographers have been able to choose to photograph our landscape and heritage whether owned by the National Trust or any other institution or agency, and to publish the pictures. Now both English Heritage and the National Trust have copyrighted our heritage. English Heritage demanded a minimum of £200 per visit in 1988, perhaps more now, for the privilege of getting inside the ropes at Stonehenge to take photographs for my book Our forbidden land. Most of us who have not been commissioned, could not possibly afford to pay any fee, let alone such a huge fee. Stonehenge is central to our heritage, and until it was enclosed (that is, taken away from us) by English Heritage, photographers such as Brandt, Edwin Smith and Caponigro and many others had given us their views. Now, however, the only views we can see are those approved by English Heritage, commissioned by them, or at least permitted by them. They have effectively copyrighted Stonehenge. Needless to say, since I cannot get close enough to form my own view of this great circle, I have shown through my photographs how the site has been trivialised by the theme park approach of English Heritage.
That much loved institution, the National Trust, with over two million members, is potentially a far greater problem, since they are the third largest landowners in the country (largest are the Forestry Commission, under threat of privatisation, and MoD, definitely out of bounds to photographers). I am particularly concerned about the Trust’s gardens, and in the longer term, the open landscape. Their directors vigorously deny that they either censor our views of their properties, or copyright them. When I wrote a letter in a photographic journal pointing out that they do just that, they called me in to a meeting. They said there were three main conditions so far as photography was concerned. Firstly, they must control their image. If that is not censorship, I will eat my hat. Secondly, they state that they do not wish unsuitable products to be advertised, using their gardens as backdrop. That is easily dealt with, simply ban advertising in their gardens, unless permission has been granted for an agreed fee. And thirdly, of course, they need to make money by selling postcards, books etc. Well, the Trust with all their clout should be able to produce publications well enough so that the odd independent photographer is not a threat to them.
I am certainly not prepared or able to pay a ‘facility fee’ of anything up to £200 a time to photograph in their gardens. They hold these properties on behalf of the nation, I am a member of this nation, and I happen to be a photographer. They do not charge painters a facility fee, nor writers who write about the properties.
The Trust assured me that they welcome amateur photographers, but at the same time would like to authorize any publication and to retain control of copyright. They know perfectly well that amateurs regularly publish their photographs in large-circulation magazines like Amateur Photographer and Rambling Today, and yet the Trust discourages ‘professionals’ whose work receives a far smaller circulation. The Trust also uses ‘volunteer’ amateur photographers to do some of their publicity work, and these photographers have to agree to give full copyright to the Trust and to “relinquish all rights…apart from private/non-commercial use”, as well as delivering all negatives and prints to the Trust.
We are being prevented from recording what I consider to be ‘our’ heritage, but which the Trust consider the be ‘theirs’. They are more landownerish than many of the most hardened private landowners.
This attitude to photography is a hindrance to all of us, and the government’s moves towards new laws on privacy in the wake of paparazzi-induced paranoia could pose an added threat to photographers, and reinforce agencies such as the Trust and English Heritage in their censorious ways. For instance: Terry Hulf, a Sussex photographer went for a walk on Trust land at Fairlight. He was coming down a public bridleway when he was accosted by two men. They told him that he had no right to take pictures on Trust land, and demanded his name and address so that they could report him to the local Trust warden, and to the police. Hulf refused, whereupon the men threatened to smash his camera.
There is no way the Trust would condone such thuggish behaviour, but the question that must be asked is: where did these two self-appointed ‘vigilantes’ get the idea that it was against the law to take pictures on National Trust open land on a public right of way? I think the Trust have only themselves to blame for this mistaken perception.
It is the National Trust jubilee in 1995, and I sincerely hope that they will see this as the occasion to change their attitude to photography, and see that photographers pose no more threat to them than painters, cartoonists, or writers.
It is imperative that we are free to publish our views of our land, whether to show the beauties of National Trust gardens or open landscape, Stonehenge, or the disgrace of the undemocratic methods of the Department of Transport in closing off access to and ruining many of our best-loved landscapes. The attitude of both these bodies is worryingly similar, and is symptomatic of a wider attitude to secrecy and the control of information among public bodies. It is an attitude inimical to reform and to enlightened environmental policy.
As Lloyd Timberlake wrote in Index on Censorship (June/July 1989), “it is impossible to maintain environmental quality and to use environmental resources sustainably without freedom of information. This has been true in the past, is true now, and is the basis for any hope that humankind will be able successfully to cope in the future with new environmental challenges”.
James Bryce proposed in his Access to Mountains (Scotland) Bill of 1884, “No owner or occupier of open country shall be entitled to exclude any person from walking or being on such land for the purposes of recreation or scientific or artistic study, or to molest him or her in so walking…”.
“For whoever may own the land, no man can own the beauty of the landscape; at all events no man can exclusively own it. Beauty is a king of property which cannot be bought, sold or conveyed in any parchment deed, but it is an inalienable common right; and he who carries the true seeing eyes in his head, no matter how poor he may otherwise be, is the legitimate lord of the landscape.”
Walks Around Huddersfield, G.S. Philips
Fay Godwin is a photographer and the author and co-author of 14 books including Our Forbidden Land, in 1990. This was a polemical look at the state of the UK environment with a plea for the basic human right of access to land and for a freedom of information act. She is well known for her workshops and landscape/environmental lectures. She gave a Schumacher lecture in 1991, was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1991, and was President of the Ramblers’ Association from 1987-1990. She is now vice president of the RA.
