As it’s Charlie’s birthday, we asked our royal correspondent Angus Young to work out which bits of his land we’re traipsing round on.
As the town where King Charles I was famously refused entry and told to sling his royal hook, it’s perhaps not surprising that his current namesake has little direct interest in Hull. However, through the Crown Estate King Charles III does have a hefty stake in the immediate surrounding area.
Technically, the assets of the Crown Estate are classed as hereditary possessions of the sovereign for the duration of their reign which are ‘held in the right of the Crown’. They range from agricultural land and forests to shopping centres and most of Regent Street in central London. Under the rules, a king or queen cannot sell them off or pocket all revenues raised from the assets. The estate isn’t fully controlled by the monarch either. Instead, it’s run by a semi-independent public body overseen by a board of commissioners with profits being split between the government and the monarch under what is known as the sovereign grant mechanism.
Accounts recently published for last year show the latest annual grant heading to the palace rising to £132m, up from £86m. This increase in profits has been attributed to the Crown’s ownership of most of the UK’s seabed stretching 12 nautical miles from the mainland and its vested rights to explore and use natural resources of the continental shelf which extends to 200 miles off the coast. Historically, the 12-mile boundary line was designed to determine jurisdiction over shipwrecks and the occasional washed-up whale. These days, the boom in offshore wind farms is boosting profits like never before. Worth remembering the next time you visit Bridlington, Hornsea or Withernsea and look out at those wind farms on the horizon. It’s not just the inland waters of the North Sea that keep a few bob coming into the Royal purse from this neck of the woods..
Most of the bed and foreshore of the Humber estuary is also owned by the Crown Estate, albeit currently leased to Associated British Ports on a 999-year term agreed back in1869. As such, developments such as the construction of the Humber Bridge and the recent extension of Alexandra Dock in Hull have both required Crown Estate approval.
The ancient royal claim on the estuary also means one of the Crown’s most unusual landholdings is the aptly named Sunk Island, an isolated chunk of mainly agricultural land in Holderness which was once part of a sandbank in the middle of the Humber. Today it’s no longer an island but a parish in its own right and home to 228 people scattered across just over 9,000 acres with the main cluster of properties around a mile from the foreshore.
Further north there’s another slab of Crown Estate land in Holderness. Back in 1866 the Crown bought 2,166 acres of land in the ancient parish of Swine from the Earl of Shaftesbury whose family had owned a significant part of it since the early 17th century. The £120,000 deal included the Earl’s inherited manor and ten farms and was part of a series of acquisitions by the Crown involving nearby land at Benningholme, Oubrough and Dowthorpe. After the purchase, the Crown embarked on a building programme in Swine with most of the current village and a number of surviving outlying farms dating from this period. It also built a new school which was used for exactly100 years until its closure in 1968 and a sewage disposal works eventually adopted by the local council in 1967,
Similar Crown-owned estates in East Yorkshire include Garton on the Wolds, Sutton-upon- Derwent and Gardham near Cherry Burton.