The leafy, residential streets of Cambridge are about as far as you can get from the arid valleys of Utah. But with its grey concrete spire and squat mid-century gabled exterior, the chapel in the suburb of Cherry Hinton could have been transplanted directly from Salt Lake City. It is a striking sign of a little-known fact: that the Mormons are a force to be reckoned with in East Anglia.
The Utah-based religious movement — founded in 1830 in New York State — rebranded in 2018, calling for “Mormon” to be abandoned in favour of the official “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. “It’s a bit of a mouthful,” admits Kevin Johnson, 56, who was raised in the faith in Norwich and now worships in Cambridge. But the focus on “latter days” is strategic: “we’re here now to make a difference in the world”. And for that, the Church needs funds.
On the other side of Cambridgeshire, it is doing God’s work, in the fertile earth of the fens. In the village of Woodwalton, near Huntingdon, it owns thousands of acres. Over the years, it has been variously reported to be the largest foreign purchaser of land in Britain; during a spree in the late Nineties, it spent £30 million on prime farmland in the space of six years. More recently, it came top of Farmers Weekly’s list of “unusual owners of UK farmland”. According to Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England?, the Church is the 78th largest landowner in the country, with 7,716 acres.
Agriculture may seem like a surprising sideline, but it is in keeping with the Church’s history — the pioneers of Mormonism, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, were both sons of farmers — and its central values. There is “an emphasis on self-reliance”, says Anne Thomas, a 27-year-old Latter Day Saint from California who just completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge — “just being prepared for anything”.
The Church’s control of land is usually indirect. It effectively runs a multinational firm named AgReserves, which was once reported to be America’s largest producer of nuts and is the largest private landowner in Florida — where it is planning a city almost 20 times the size of Manhattan. A subsidiary of the firm, Farmland Reserve UK Ltd, exists in this country as both a registered charity and a limited company, according to documents lodged at Companies House. Its principal activity is arable farming, and it has been reaping the rewards of soaring global cereal prices. It owns land worth almost £54 million and buildings worth almost £17 million.
While their religious activities — which include handing out literature on the street — are highly visible, their business enterprises are not. The church was quick to tell me that while its community members would be happy to be interviewed, “the farmland entity” would not.
It was not always so media-shy. Back in 1999, The Independent was invited into its boardroom on Manor Farm. A printed sign read: “Our business is farmland. Profit motivated: No Excuses.” In the Nineties, it was expanding — into Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. Now, it is going into retreat. Accepting that the “scattered nature of some of the parcels of land do lead to some labour and equipment inefficiencies”, the company is consolidating its land holdings “around one major farm centre in Cambridgeshire”.
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