THE KING’S ESTATES

Northern Advocate, 15 July 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE KING’S ESTATES

The King is one of the richest landlords in Britain, says Ernest Betts in the “News Chronicle.” In the West End alone. Regent Street, Carlton House Terrace, and part of Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly and Oxford Street, are Crown Property. But the King gets no money from them. They are administered by the Crown Commissioners, and the profits go to the Exchequer.

In a few weeks’ time the Commissioners of Crown Lands—the high officials who collect the rents and manage the Hereditary Estates of the Crown—will be totting up their accounts for the year.

They make a good showing. The profit would rejoice the City. Up to the end of March, 1938 (the 1939 figures are not available), the Commissioners presented to the Exchequer the dazzling sum of £1,330,300.

It may surprise you to know that the Commissioners control about 350,000 acres of Land in England, Scotland and Wales. They are among the richest landlords in the kingdom.

When you enter a shop or a cinema in Regent Street you are on Crown land. Sitting in the stalls of the Haymarket Theatre, or His Majesty’s, or the Criterion, you are on Crown land. The august members of the Athenaeum, the. Reform and the Carlton Clubs stroll toward a sherry at lunch time on Crown land.

In London alone about 4,000 buildings are administered by the Commissioners, mostly in Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly, Oxford Street and Kensington Palace Gardens.

But there are mines and quarries, fishings in the Wye and Spey, great sporting estates and their Lodges in Scotland; the Windsor Parks and Woods, and about G,OOO houses and other buildings, in addition to many farmhouses, in various parts of the country.

Of all this the agricultural land accounts for some 150,000 acres. The Windsor Estate is a further 13,000 acres. To this you must add churches, “pubs” and whole villages scattered up and down the kingdom.

This kingly estate (though the King himself receives nothing from it) is presided over by two Commissioners, one of whom is always the Minister of Agriculture. The Minister’s appointment as an ex-officio Commissioner arises from the interest the 1906 Government had in converting land into small holdings.

The Commissioners have an office in Whitehall exactly opposite the Admiralty, with a permanent staff of 100 persons and over 200 men looking after the parks and woods at Windsor.

So far as the London property goes, the Commissioners are advised by a Standing Advisory Committee appointed in 1933. of which Lord Gorell is chairman and Sir Giles Scott and Mr.. Frank Pick (of London Transport) among the members.

The Commissioners have plenty to occupy them, and you would think, from their activities, that they must have an almost supernatural wisdom. For instance, they must decide what constructive schemes in London or other places, can be devised to please the public eye.

They must know which houses should be preserved as notable; which public house licences be retained; when a piece of open country can be properly “developed” and when not what a house elevation will really look like when the builders have gone; who is the right architect for a particular job; what shop fronts or signs can be allowed without offence (see Regent Street for example); when tenants may be allowed to convert their houses into flats; whether avenues of fine trees should bo cut down for the safety of children or preserved as beautiful.

The Commissioners had an, especially

worrying time with the rebuilding of Regent Street when a nation of shopkeepers decided that it should be rebuilt piecemeal instead of as a whole in the way Nash conceived it. But the graceful Nash buildings in Regent’s Park and Carlton House Terrace are to be kept intact so long as there are suitable tenants to occupy them.

Another achievement for which we can thank the Crown Commissioners is the huge block of working-class flats newly erected in Cumberland Market, to the East of Regent’s Park. A hideous hinterland of wharves and rotting houses round the basin of the Canal was swept away for this project, and the result is a fine piece of planning which, when completed, will have cost about £750,000.

These flats, at rents from 7/9 upwards, are strictly reserved for working class people on the Crown Estate, but many Londoners who are comparatively well off have tried to rent them and have received firm but courteous intimations that they must live elsewhere.

In and around London you will find a number of architectural schemes devised by the Commissioners which we now take as a matter of course. Windsor Great Park is one of them. The laying-out of Kensington Palace Gardens as a model town property is another. Regent’s Park is a third. This, with its flower gardens and lake, is the masterpiece of Nash, the then architect to the Commissioners.

It was not until the time of George 111. that the revenues collected from the Crown Lands were surrendered to Parliament. Before then, the money went into the King’s pocket, and up to 1925 the Crown Lands Office was known as the Office of Woods and Forests. These rustic but vital duties are now mainly in the hands of the Forestry Commission.

But the wealth of the Crown Lands is undiminished —in fact, very much

on the increase. In 1862 the Hereditary Estates brought in a paltry £300,000. To-day they send a cheque for more than a million-and-a-quarter pounds to the Exchequer, and in addition to this the Crown Commissioners hold over £3,000,000 in stocks and shares. It may not always be pleasant to be a landlord, but how very pleasant, how altogether delightful, to be a Crown Commissioner!