Regent Street is one of the most iconic shopping destinations in the world. The grand, curving street is home to Apple’s flagship store, as well as storied London shops like Liberty and Hamleys. And almost all of it belongs to King Charles III. Or, to be more precise, the Crown Estate—the commercial real estate business that owns and manages vast swaths of land and property belonging to the British monarch.
The Crown Estate’s property empire includes Twitter’s London HQ, multiple shopping centers, and the Ascot racecourse, but its dominion extends well beyond the shores of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Since 1964, the Crown Estate has laid claim to the UK’s entire continental shelf, reaching hundreds of kilometers into the sea, and with it the right to grant permissions to build offshore wind turbines, lay pipelines, and store carbon under the seabed.
For years, the seabed was a sideshow to the royal family’s sprawling terrestrial property empire. But over the past few years it’s leapt in value, as a result of the booming market for renewable energy. After rising incrementally for years, the value of the seabed doubled between 2020 and 2021. By 2022, the Crown Estate estimated its marine portfolio was worth £5 billion ($6.3 billion).
Globally, there has been a dramatic acceleration in ocean-based industries, with the OECD projecting that the ocean economy could exceed $3 trillion by 2030. But the UK, with its 29,000 kilometers of coastline, has been an early mover in commercializing its coastal waters beyond the traditional sectors of oil and gas, seafood, and shipping. The Crown Estate has facilitated and profited from much of this new activity, working in tandem with the government to rent out areas of ocean to companies that want to install offshore wind turbines, dredge up sand and gravel for the construction industry, lay cables for internet traffic and electricity, or build pipelines for oil and gas. It’s also responsible for handing out the rights to store carbon—a potentially lucrative future industry.
Not all the money generated by the seabed around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland funds the royals. A quarter of the Crown Estate’s profits goes to the British monarchy via a system called the sovereign grant, while the rest flows into the public purse through the finance ministry. Scotland has a different system, where the government takes 100 percent of the profits generated by the Crown Estate Scotland, a separate entity. But as King Charles officially takes the throne on Saturday, the monarch will preside over a royal family that is partly funded by a new era of ocean industry.
During King Charles’ tenure, Crown Estate commissioners will make decisions that will permanently change Britain’s seabed—choosing which companies and industries get priority in an increasingly busy sea. Already, the high cost of leasing the seabed to develop offshore wind projects is shutting small companies out of the process. And as competition to store carbon under the sea heats up, there is a danger that the new seabed economy will look disturbingly similar to the old one, with a handful of oil and gas giants dominating and locking in a future based on fossil fuels.