Sark

What Sark is

Sark is one of the Channel Islands and one of the smallest self-governing territories in the world. It belongs to the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency, which makes it a possession of the Crown rather than part of the United Kingdom or the European Union, with its own parliament, the Chief Pleas, and its own body of law. Cars are banned, and in 2011 it became the world’s first Dark Sky Island.

Where Sark is

The island lies in the south-western English Channel off the coast of Normandy and covers about 5.4 square kilometres including the neighbouring island of Brecqhou. There is no airport: the crossing is by ferry from St Peter Port on Guernsey, roughly 55 minutes, and the nearest airports are Guernsey’s and Jersey’s.

How Sark is governed

The Chief Pleas is Sark’s parliament: eighteen elected Conseillers, half of whom stand every two years, with a Speaker and the Seigneur sitting without a vote. The Seigneur holds the island as a fief from the Crown, a title held since 2016 by Christopher Beaumont, the 23rd Seigneur; he may delay primary legislation, but the Chief Pleas can override him by a simple majority. Sark’s laws take effect with Royal Assent through the Privy Council, and the island sets its own budget independently of Guernsey.

Tax

Sark levies no income tax, no capital gains tax, no inheritance tax and no sales tax. Public spending is funded instead by a property tax, a personal capital tax that every adult resident pays within a fixed annual band, duties on alcohol, tobacco and fuel, and a transfer tax on property sales.

Living on Sark

Around five hundred people live on the island year-round, rising to about a thousand in the tourist season. Anyone who is a British citizen or entitled to live in the United Kingdom may move to Sark. Homes built since 1976 are reserved for people with fifteen years’ residence or local family ties, while the older “open market” dwellings can be bought or rented by newcomers without restriction, and residents join the electoral roll after two years.

How Sark came about

The fief of Sark was granted in 1565 by Elizabeth I to Helier de Carteret, on condition that he settle forty armed men there to hold the island against pirates. The tenants of those original holdings sat in the Chief Pleas by right for more than four centuries, which made Sark the last feudal state in Europe, until a new constitution brought the island its first fully democratic elections in 2008.

The plan to renew Sark

The island is also the object of a long-running attempt to renew it, and that effort is much of the reason Sark is listed here alongside projects built from nothing. By 2020 its resident population had fallen to about 360 from some 600 a decade earlier, the average resident was 65 years old, much of the housing stood empty or derelict, and the only supermarket was thought to be close to closing. Swen Lorenz, an investor who had made the island his base in 2017, answered with a manual on how and why to move to Sark: the BBC picked the campaign up within a day, and 120 new residents had registered four months later. He and Christopher Beaumont have argued since, in their talks and interviews, that self-government of this kind is only as durable as the community carrying it.

An investment plan followed, prepared with the Seigneur and his heir Hugh Beaumont and made public in 2023: buy and restore up to £100m of the island’s existing buildings, which they calculated could house about 1,200 people without adding a square foot, and pay for the expert work behind a long-term plan if the island wanted one. The vehicle was the Guernsey-registered Sark Property Company, set up by the two of them with the Seigneur as one of its two directors. Its proposals reached past property to a guarantee that would let a bank write the island’s first mortgages, affordable housing, harbour studies and a seeded emergency fund, and Lorenz proposed listing the company publicly, with a cap on any one holder’s votes so that no investor could buy a jurisdiction. Its £20m cash bid for the Barclay family’s Sark portfolio, about a fifth of the island’s land, was turned down in 2024 over the asking price.