Do you know who owns the land beneath your feet? If you could find out who owns a plot of land in your neighbourhood, would it change the way that you think of that place in any way? Would it change the way that you behave? As we move through the places where we live and work every day, are we affected by land ownership?

At first glance, you might think not.

Land ownership is one of those things that determines what happens (and what doesn’t happen) in our neighbourhoods. It can affect our lives in many ways – yet ownership itself is often invisible. You can’t usually see by looking at a field, a yard, an empty building or a woodland who actually owns it. So if you’d like to use that field for a community picnic, paint a mural in that yard, find out the history of that empty building or set up a friends group for that woodland… where do you start?

Who Owns My Neighbourhood? aims to give people a starting point for getting things done in their own neighbourhoods. We hope this service will make it easier for people to have conversations about their local area and for us to answer each other’s questions by sharing what we know. We want people to think about what personal responsibility we are each willing to take for the place where we live, and how we might be able to help each other to look after it.

Some of the things we hope to work out together are:

• How can we make it easier for community groups to use public spaces?
• Should any part of a neighbourhood be unused?
• Who’s responsible for keeping our neighbourhoods clean?
• Who decides how land is used?

If you have an interest in a particular plot of land, you can sign up to become a ‘community contact’ and keep in touch with other people who care about the same area. You can also tell us your latest news about local places, or share local history and local places names. We hope this will be a good way of gathering together our local knowledge and using it to get things done.

The foundation of this site is Kirklees Council’s land ownership information, which we’ve made available online for the first time as part of this project. We’ll be using this blog to explain some of the issues about land ownership and to let you know how the project is going. We intend to add other types of information to Who Owns My Neighbourhood? in the future, in response to what local people tell us is useful. If you have ideas or suggestions then please let us know.

We realise that there are lots of things you can’t see just by looking – you can’t see someone’s memories of a place or someone’s aspirations for what it might become in the future.

Who Owns My Neighbourhood? is about uncovering that hidden knowledge, as much as it is about opening up land ownership information.

This is a shared space – what grows from it is up to you.