The Other Side

The ownership of land and property is unlike most other goods - a car or a kettle, say. You cannot pick it up and move it elsewhere, you cannot destroy it, the changes you can make to it are limited by law: you do not own minerals, coal or oil that exist below the surface; you do not own the air above it; you cannot put anything you like on it (from buildings to sewage sludge) without appropriate permission; it is quite easy to change farmland into woodland, but much more difficult to change it back again within the law. There are many more examples

A few years ago or was found that one of the brewery chimneys was unsafe. The managing director - the fifth generation of one of the two families that built the chimney (and the entire brewery) sought permission to take it down, as it no longer serves any functional purpose for brewing. This was refused on the grounds that it is an integral part of this (grade II) listed, heritage building. Making safe the chimney cost the business a six-figure sum, at today's values

It's very easy to see both sides of this argument. The chimney would not be there without five generations of stewardship and expenditure. But the stewardship, the business itself, would not be possible without the customers, the visitors, 150 years of labour, and the provision of infrastructure by the state - funded by all our taxes - that make it possible to run a business at all. Ownership is not the only stake in the building

I don't have a pat answer to this, just the observation that these constraints on ownership exist and it is someone's responsibility to decide what is fair and reasonable

A nice bonus of chicken-sitting is this privileged view of the brewery in the quiet of the spring dawn. This north east aspect does not see the sun for many months in the winter, and this elevated position in our neighbours' garden gives a nicely-balanced perspective that all the visitors do not see