The answer is that we don't fully know but we probably soon will.  The land registry has been pushing for all the unrecorded parts of England to be registered and Guy Shrubsole and others have been pushing the Land Registry to put more of the information freely into the public domain.  What we do know so far is very well documented in Guy's book which is both analytical and full of relevant anecdotes.  England is 32 million acres in size with over half being agricultural and several million acres is natural waste such as mountains and bog so the urban area is only around 12% - less than 4 million acres.  The book establishes that there are some very chunky landowners such as the government, but there are also large holdings that go back, in effect, to the year 1066 such as the many estates where the owners can trace the titles back to the Norman conquest to say nothing of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster which are "sort of" owned by the Royals.  With help from ace researcher and collaborator Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole was able to work out that about 12% of England is owned by public sector bodies if you include the Crown and Church and conservation charities.  A further large proportion (around 5%) is held by the top 100 land-owning companies in England and Wales where the biggest owners including utility companies (United Utilities 140,000 acres and Welsh Water 78,000 acres). Read more...