Guardian: A wealthy and politically powerful landowner has applied to the Land Registry to assert his "manorial" rights to extract minerals from under hundreds of properties in the London commuter belt.
Lawyers acting for the Marquess of Salisbury, who owns land in Dorset, Hertfordshire and London and who is worth an estimated 300m, has written to residents in Welwyn Garden City to claim his ancestral rights, which stem from a Victorian court case. These include "market and fair rights, sporting rights...