It is available in a web-friendly format (with clickable endnotes) separated by section:
(It has also been split into a Substack series)
A hardcopy of the publication can be ordered by contacting the CEME office (office@theceme.org)
A launch event was held in July 2023.
This publication by John Kroencke examines the great estates of London: the large aristocratic landowners who, from the 17th century onwards, developed new districts of inner London. Families such as the Grosvenors in Mayfair and Belgravia and the Cadogans in Chelsea kept ownership of the land as it was built on through leasehold development. When leases ended after a set term, control of the whole area returned to the landowner.
Kroencke shows how this leasehold system amounted to a form of private planning. It worked partly through decisions made when an estate was first laid out. More importantly, it worked over the long term, through private law restrictions and the landowner’s continued ownership. He argues that these planning functions were carried out with an eye to the market. Because their landholdings were so large, the great estates could capture spillover effects that piecemeal development could not.
Rather than maximising the value of any single plot, the estates maximised value across a whole area and over time. This gave them both the interest and the means to provide public goods, such as garden squares like Grosvenor Square and Belgrave Square, and to prevent negative externalities.
ISBN: 9781910666234
The best study available online
As John Kroencke explains in his excellent recent monograph, Private Planning and the Great Estates, many of those “graceful suburbs”, beloved by residents, were in large part built through leasehold — the very ogre the Housing Secretary’s proposed legislation purports to slay.
The reasons for London’s comparative beauty in residential architecture to, say, New York’s, are myriad and beyond simple illustration, but one compelling explanation is the strength of private landholders in the capital, who during crucial eras of development wielded considerably more power than either the state or the Crown. We owe London’s formidably memorable terraces to the Grosvenors, Cadogans, Portmans, Bedfords, and other illustrious families who constructed leasehold properties with an eye to posterity rather than the quick flip. In Private Planning and the Great Estates: Lessons from London, John Kroencke, a senior research fellow at the Oxford-based Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics, explores the nature of London’s traditional housing market and draws lessons that may be useful today.
John joined the Centre in 2021 after finishing his PhD in Economics at George Mason University. He spent the 2020-21 academic year as a Final Year Fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University.
His research role involves research on political economy and the application of basic economic theory to public policy, often through detailed historical work that stresses the institutional context of economic action and the failure of policy experts to understand the outcomes they seek to regulate. As part of this, he completed research on the role of the aristocratic great estates in inner London as an interesting case study showing the capacity of large landowners to capture spillover effects and engage in long-term planning. He has also written a primer on the economics of environmental harm and protection.
