In a housing colony, a freeholder is the one who owns a house for life and can make any changes to the house, but there may be other owners or lease-holders who cannot make any changes as they like because they have an agreement/lease with that housing colony administration which restricts them not to do as they like with their property.

I learned the meaning of ‘freeholder’ the hard way when I was with my children in a housing colony in Beckton (London), where one fine day somebody from the management came over and removed the TV dish that was projecting out on to the walkway down below without our consent; and, naturally getting annoyed, my son sent an email attaching photos of the other houses which had TV dishes and other metal projections hanging precariously down on to the ground to the Housing Office, demanding an explanation, and the prompt reply we got was that those houses were of “freeholders” who were free to do what they liked at their own risk and we being just ‘lease-holders’ were restricted to limited freedom!

The term ‘freeholders’ for those elected county representatives in certain counties in the US has a long history: in the past only people who had land of their own were allowed to vote in an election and those lease-holders and other labourers were not, and the same tradition continued to this day and the term stayed on.