Cattle grazed there on the way to Smithfield, and the ground survived only because commoners fought for it
The London Fields holds a 4.4 from nine hundred and forty-seven people, charges ten to thirty pounds, and the fields it is named after very nearly stopped existing.
What they were for
Grazing, and specifically grazing on the way to market.
London Fields was common land on a droving route – and cattle being walked to Smithfield from Essex and beyond needed somewhere to stop, rest and eat before the final few miles.
A drover who arrived with exhausted, thin animals got a worse price. So he stopped, on the edge of the city, and let them graze.
And the ground was common, which meant local people also had rights over it – to graze their own animals, to gather fuel, to take what the law called the profits of the soil.
The enclosure
Which is what nearly took it.
Between roughly 1750 and 1850, several thousand Acts of Parliament extinguished common rights across England and handed the land to private owners.
It is one of the largest transfers of property in European history and almost nobody is taught about it.
And it was resisted, and it was resisted here – because a common on the edge of a growing city is worth an enormous amount as building land, and every landowner adjacent to it knew that perfectly well.
London Fields survived because people fought for it, in courts and in public meetings and occasionally by tearing down fences.
The rhyme
Which is four lines long and which has outlived every one of those Acts.
The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common – but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from the goose.
And the second verse, which almost nobody knows, is better.
The law demands that we atone when we take things we do not own – but leaves the lords and ladies fine who take things that are yours and mine.
Which we have now found in six postcodes
Every piece of open ground in this city that ordinary people are allowed to sit on was fought for, by somebody, against somebody who wanted to build on it.
Victoria Park was won by a petition of thirty thousand signatures from people who mostly could not write.
Brook Green survived enclosure.
And London Fields is grass in Hackney because a group of people two hundred years ago refused to let it be sold.
Not one of them was a gift.
Verdict
Good pub, honest number. Go, and then sit on the grass, and know it was won.
The lammas rights
Which is the specific legal mechanism and which is worth knowing.
A great deal of ground around London was held under lammas rights – meaning that after the hay was cut, on Lammas Day, the land reverted to common grazing until the following spring.
Which means the landowner owned it, and the commoners had rights over it, and both were true at once.
And it is extremely difficult to build on land that several hundred people have a legal right to graze cattle on every autumn.
That awkwardness is why a number of London’s open spaces still exist – not because anybody protected them, but because the paperwork to extinguish them was too much trouble.
Carys Evans is a prolific satirical journalist and comedy writer with a strong track record of published work. Her humour is analytical, socially aware, and shaped by both academic insight and London’s vibrant creative networks. Carys often tackles media narratives, cultural trends, and institutional quirks with sharp wit and structured argument.
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