‘We have been dispossessed’: Nick Hayes on land rights and a peaceful revolution at the real Toad Hall

The co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign and author of The Book of Trespass discusses the Oxfordshire riverside community he calls home and how Hardwick Hall has been taken back by the people

On the banks of the Thames in South Oxfordshire, the Hardwick estate has been owned by the Rose family for generations. When Sir Charles Rose, a banker, sportsman, yachtsman and aviator, sped through the lanes in his Rolls-Royce in the early days of motoring, he inspired Kenneth Grahame to create Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s character became a symbol of decadent aristocracy whose foolishness leads to the temporary loss of a fine house to weasel-socialists.

Now Toad Hall has been taken over for good and Nick Hayes, artist, writer and co-founder of the Right to Roam campaign, has had a riverside view of this striking turn of events. When Hayes, who lives on a beautiful wide-beamed barge on the Thames, became the Hardwick estate’s artist-in-residence, he discovered that Rose’s heirs are, in effect, disinheriting themselves. The estate is gradually being turned into a charity which will be run by the tenants and the alternative community that has grown up in its shelter.

The story of this peaceful revolution unfolds in his new book, The Medicine Tree, a sweeping alternative history of England that reaches across the globe for examples of colonial oppression and Indigenous enlightenment. Hayes poses some big questions. Why do English people lack a culture of connection with their land? And how might we forge a new one?

Indigenous societies have stories, songs, philosophies and religions that bind them to their terrain. Such sacred traditions are still alive in many countries and can encourage modern societies to live sustainably, resist pollution and extraction, or create assertive legal rights for nature, as established on New Zealand’s Whanganui River. It is “an act of extreme exceptionalism to suppose that we were the only country on Earth not to have had a spiritual, mythopoetic relationship with the land,” Hayes writes.

“If we were to look at English history through a colonial prism, we’d start to see ourselves as people that have been dispossessed as well,” he says, as we talk inside his cosy boat, swallows dipping over the water. “Community and ecology are the two big losses. England is in desperate need of repair in terms of epidemics of loneliness, in terms of one in six species going extinct.”

There was no one moment when England’s land culture was lost, Hayes argues, but “a very steady letting of England’s veins” over 2,000 years: Christianity took away animism, while myth and folklore was lost with enclosure and the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The Medicine Tree is his attempt to plot a recreation of a useful English land culture: not nationalistic, not nostalgic and not off-the-peg folklore as invented by, say, Robert Graves in The White Goddess.

Hayes was inspired by poet and storyteller Hugh Lupton’s idea of “restorying the landscape” to take one local tree, his “medicine tree”, as a symbol of his story. This soaring tree, beside the busy Thames path, turns out to be a hybrid of a (native) black poplar and an eastern cottonwood, brought to Europe from North America by French colonists. It invites a comparison between disparate cultures, not least because in both Indigenous and old European societies the poplar stood for community.

Hayes grew up near here in the 80s and 90s. When we meet he is wearing a grubby pink vest adorned with an image of the Cerne Abbas giant and has just watched two boys jump into the water from the pretty, white-painted bridge that dinks over the river at Pangbourne. The elder boy led the way with a back-flip; his nervous younger brother eventually following with a maiden jump. “Did you see that?” he says. “It was so beautiful.”

It is an idyllic scene but it is also bittersweet. The Thames has sewage discharged into it by privatised water companies and the bridge, nicknamed “the troll bridge” by locals, is an anachronistic privately owned toll bridge, which causes traffic jams every morning as motorists queue to pay 60p to cross the Thames. The bridge belongs to a company owned by a family who can trace their ancestry to one of William the Conqueror’s barons. Hayes estimates this local waster of everyone’s time enriches the company by more than £1m each year.

The English mostly accept such states of affairs as normal, natural and possibly even desirable. When Hayes was young, he couldn’t wait to escape this “affluent, middle-class” suburban environment and assumed he would never return. He had no real connection with the land, or nature, until university, where he was taught by Robert Macfarlane. After reading Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places, he cycled from Cambridge to wild-camp on the Gog Magog hills outside the city. “I felt like a weirdo bedding down, had a joint because I didn’t know if I’d sleep, and woke up having had a gorgeous night. The membrane burst in my head,” he says. He began camping with friends in fields and forests, trespassing, and learning more about the land.

In 2020, he and Guy Shrubsole founded the Right to Roam campaign, seeking a responsible right of access to the 92% of land in England and Wales we are now excluded from. Hayes put his vision in The Book of Trespass, a strikingly original, bullishly well-written declaration of the benefits and responsibilities that could flow from people being granted more access to private land. In the years since, Right to Roam has held more than 15 peaceful mass trespasses and defended attempts to restrict access by major landowners, including a court battle by a hedge fund manager seeking to curb wild camping rights on Dartmoor.

The Medicine Tree follows Hayes’s journey home, living on his boat (because no artist could afford a house in this London commuter belt), and discovery of Hardwick, where an alternative community of around 90 tenants renting on the estate has slowly coalesced over several decades. On learning how their family wealth was ultimately derived from colonial extraction and exploitation in North America, the sibling heirs to the land have decided to turn it into a charity, and England’s first community-owned estate.

In The Medicine Tree, the members of this community are named only after their occupations: the Dyer, the Head Grower, the Heiress. “I wanted to lean into the whole story as a fairytale, a folk-tale,” says Hayes. Unlike much contemporary nonfiction, Hayes does not fill the book with himself but instead directs his rage at the “taxidermied corpse” of English heritage, with its country houses that are “decorative manhole covers on a system of sewerage that drained, and still drains, the wealth of England and the world”.

Hayes strikes me as a natural rebel, but he bristles at this for the same reason he doesn’t like being described as “a campaigner”: he thinks it diminishes taking a rational stand against an issue by suggesting it is a personality trait. That said, he read Christopher Hitchens’s Letters to a Young Contrarian “about 15 times”. He has always opposed “unfair or pointless rules. The big thing for me is orthodoxies so deep-set that they don’t even seem to be rules any more.” He points to a “Danger! Adders in this area” sign, one of many trophies that ornament his boat. “The purpose of that sign is to keep people out of their land, not warn people of adders. I would suggest that most adders are unsigned. All of these things can embed in our operating system.”

What’s also embedded in England’s exclusionary, profit-making system of land ownership are landowners’ rights. Hayes tells of his community’s (daring, futile) attempts to stop the no-fault, short-notice eviction of the Carver and his family from their home on a neighbouring estate. “Losing a family who have done nothing but contribute to this valley for 26 years made me realise that eviction is not just an action against one family but an action against a community. The thing that makes me contrarian is that we just accept it. There doesn’t have to be a society where eviction is seen as the landowner’s right.”

How do we reforge a culture of connection with the land? More land rights would help, says Hayes, but so would more time on the land. “I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to be a basket weaver, but when people come to the country from the town, it does not take them long to shed their need for a mobile phone, to shed their post-industrial mind.”

As night falls, people from all over Hardwick emerge from the darkness to gather in a circle on the banks of the Thames beside Hayes’s boat. They bring guitars and accordions and even a saxophone. Songs are played and stories are told.

“I’m wondering if land culture just grows like weeds,” says Hayes. “This English obsession with ancient heritage is tripping us up. Put people together with a certain amount of freedom, rights and responsibilities – work, duties, stuff to do on the land. People are going to start talking. People are going to start singing.”

• The Medicine Tree: Repairing the Rotten Roots of England by Nick Hayes is published by Allen Lane. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.