Film review: Our Land, directed by Orban Wallace, 2026. 91 minutes.
Featuring the voices of right to roam campaigners in England and a handful of aristocratic landowners (the only ones who agreed to be interviewed), this new documentary directed by Orban Wallace calls for the expansion of ‘responsible’ public access to land in England and Wales. Campaigners want an English equivalent of the Scottish legislation, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003, which grants the public temporary access (for walking, camping or swimming/or kayaking) to most land and inland water. In England only 8% of land and inland water (farmland, rivers, moors and woods…) is publicly accessible under current legislation, with those ignoring the ‘private land’ signs on gates and fences committing a civic trespassing offence. In Wales, only 20% of land is considered open access.
The filmmakers do the public a service in exposing the bloody history of injustice which lies behind today’s arrangement, in a simple and visually creative way, and they capture the beauty of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. But instead of building on this, by exploring how capitalism’s profitability crisis is today expressed in concentrated land ownership,* the film gives over its attention to reactionary or supposedly more ‘thoughtful’ landowners and their ‘opponents’, liberal campaigners, who do not actually oppose private land ownership. While these interviews are revealing in themselves they will not satisfy the public’s want for deeper understanding and justice.
At the Glasgow premiere of the film one audience member in the Q&A challenged the idea that private land ownership could be squared with the common public interest. Scottish land campaigners are warning that our rights to roam are increasingly under threat from landowner driven encroachments and neglect. Scotland continues to have one of most concentrated landownership models in the world.
Land campaigner Andy Wightman reports that as of 2025, only 408 private landowners, a mix of international capitalist and aristocratic interests, own roughly 50% of private rural land in Scotland, where 83% of all rural land is privately owned. In England, half of all land is owned by less than 1% of its population, about 25,000 big landowners from the aristocracy and corporations. Right to roam only scratches the surface of the real issue, the existence of private property.
One of the film makers’ motivations was to get a conversation started. It will no doubt spark debate among the chattering classes but the class struggle will not wait for them to make up their minds. With a deepening social, economic and environmental crisis, created by this profit driven imperialist system, the people of no property, the mass of the working class and oppressed, must fight, like the Irish Marxist revolutionary James Connolly, executed by the British ruling class in 1916, to assert: ‘our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth’. Abolish private property! Fight for socialism!
Dominic Mulgrew
*See Whose land is it anyway? Housing, capitalism and the working class, Larkin Publications 2018
Whose Land is it Anyway? Housing, Capitalism and the Working Class
This pamphlet describes the rise and fall of council housing over the last 100 years. It shows the link between the price of land, public housebuilding, private development and those involved in creating the housing conditions of today. It covers the issues of ‘Right to Buy’, ‘affordable’ housing and why, in some areas, the price of residential land has risen faster than the price of gold.
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