I've been watching a show called "Farming The Wild" about this English chef who goes out hunting game for the restaurants.

He talks about how people should be hunting and eating all this fresh game.  Does the general public even have access to places to hunt? He mentioned middle men who handle that kind of thing which sounded to me like selling access to hunting land.  Sort of like what some people do here in the states except we can hunt public land for free, so paying for a hunt is more for folks who have a lot of money.

Is there an option like that over there or are you forced to pay for access if you want to hunt? Here in the states it's pretty pricey to hunt on the private game ranches and way too expensive for the average person so I'm thankful for public land access.  I guess I'm asking what options, if any, there are for the non-wealthy in the UK?

Here you need permission to shoot/take game on the land you intend to shoot. This doesn't have to be paid for but that is a private matter between the owner of the land and the shooter.

You cannot just go hunting on public land although some public land will have access granted for shooting purposes for population control and to harvest the meat. What you have to realise, here in the UK the public land is relatively much smaller than that in the States and you will often come across walkers or other land users making general hunting quite dangerous and usually not allowed unless the land gets closed to the public.

There are estates across the country that will offer paid stalks with and without a guide, these are expensive and you will most likely need to buy a tweed hunting jacket as well .

Most hunters will try and cultivate an agreement with a local farmer or land owner and then things can be a lot cheaper (and often exclusive) and many will jealously guard their patch and keep their farmer friends close.

There are so many deer here now (according to the British Deer Society - more than there ever has been) and so few hunters taking them that it can be relatively easy to find a hunter who will let you shoot with them or a land owner who welcomes the control.

There is a move to stop meat getting in to the food chain if it has been shot with lead bullets but I'm not sure how far that has gone. But luckily as a farmer I don't need to worry about that just yet and we just shoot for our own consumption. We farm a few thousand acres and between us we take a few dozen deer each year along with pheasants and partridges and one deer can last me a long time, we rarely make much of a dent in the population.

That is as perfect an answer as I could ask for, thank you.  Having access to your own land sounds great.  Personally, I'd rather harvest my own game and never buy meat from a store.  Maybe someday I'll have my own land and that'll be the case.  

 I lived for years in a place that had only a tiny area of public access hunting available and it was always packed with hunters each season making it all but impossible to actually take any game.  Private landowners will almost never let people hunt their land here but will occasionally lease it out to people who can pay the large sums involved.  While living there I just had to give up altogether on hunting which really stinks when you're used to stocking the freezers with venison.

Where I recently moved to there's more public hunting land access so it's time to start getting my skills back up.

Thanks for your response!

You're welcome.

It seems there are some tricky rules and regulations everywhere, but we don't have it too bad here. In the shooter's favour there aren't many of us but still not enough places for everyone to hunt, but many of the UK gun owners are purely target shooters and not hunters.
On the down side our small numbers go against us when any lobbying is needed in parliament.