​​ ​🗺️ Where Fresh Thinking Meets Britain’s Oldest Bottleneck

​Land is key to economic growth and equality of opportunity, yet in Britain we’ve done almost nothing in decades to unlock our most limited resource. Is it any wonder houses are unaffordable, productivity has stalled and social mobility has flatlined?

​Co-founded by Francis Irving, co-creator of TheyWorkForYou, and Henry Morris, founder of the social mobility charity upReach, Land Talks is a series of evenings to inspire and connect high-agency people to reimagine land for everyone’s benefit.

​⚡ Lightning Talks, Lasting Ideas

​Each evening features six sharp, informative and inspirational lightning talks. The six brilliant speakers and their provocative talks booked for the eighth evening of Land Talks are:

​🕵️ Murder & Missing Data: Opening Up the Planning Crime Files by Ewa Moskwiak

​Britain’s most talked-about crime of 2023 took one night, had no human victim and put two men in prison for four years. What does it have to do with a 1947 law and over a million records, most of them on paper? Ewa from PlanningHub unseals the true planning crime files, and suggests how data might just help prevent the next one.

​🧑‍💻 Housing Hacks: Diagnosing London’s Housing Crisis One Saturday At A Time by Jamie “Jam” Coombes

​A Section 21 notice turned Jam’s interest in housing personal. He ran the numbers on the government’s 1.5 million homes target and concluded the cavalry wasn’t coming. Stuck, he asked an AI what to do; it said: run housing data hackathons. So he created House London!. Three in, Jam shares the teams’ findings that took him aback and what happens when data people get playful.

​🏰 One Pile, Several Families: The Co-house One Family Couldn’t Create by Ira Bolychevsky

​Ira and her partner had a London rental, a baby due and a Rightmove habit for country piles. The plan: one pile, several families, children free to roam. The problem: social, financial and legal barriers, multiplied since the 1970s, when Britain’s co-housing movement began. Ira tells of the co-house they couldn’t create, what it says about Britain, and the one they joined instead.

​🎩 Private Finance: The Rule the Treasury Seems to Forget by David Rosof-Williams

​The canals, the Piccadilly line and the Blair-era PFI hospitals Britain will pay for three times over: all national infrastructure built with private money. David separates the triumphs from the scandals and reveals the rule Brunel broke, his rivals learned, and the Treasury seems to forget.

​🧢 Cap & Buy Back: How Rent Control Could Pay for Social Housing by Beth Stratford

​Every economist knows where rent control leads: Stockholm, with its decade-long queues to get a home. Beth begs to differ. New HMRC data shows what landlords really earn, and what taxpayers pay them in housing benefit: billions a year that could go to social housing instead. Her case: cap the rents, let landlords sell, and buy their homes for social rent with the savings.

​🧮 Ground Truth: What’s the Land Under Your House Worth? by Joe Davis

​Joe’s built a calculator that prices the land under every house in England and Wales. He shares what a train station is really worth, why a small plot beats a big one per square metre, and reveals who’d win and who’d lose if Council Tax were charged on the land alone, without the house on top.

​📋 How the Evening Will Run

• ​Arrive upstairs (accessible by stairs only) from 6.00 p.m.

• ​Talks plus questions: 6.30 p.m.

• ​Finger food: 7.00 p.m.

• ​Talks plus questions: 7.45 p.m.

• ​Chat with your fellow groundbreakers for as long as you like!

​​​​👯 Join the Groundbreakers

​Whether you’re an analyst, policy wonk, programmer, policymaker, activist, or simply passionate about a brighter, more abundant future, join us at the eighth Land Talks to make Britain’s land system work harder for everyone’s benefit. In the meantime, find out more at landtalks.org.