The dispute saw the Oxford dons awarded £200,000 (Image: Champion News)
Two have won a £200,000 neighbours’ row with a hotel over a and claims its staff are “smoking and chatting” too close to their front door.
History Prof Nick Stargardt, who appeared on TV show ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany,’ and his anthropologist partner, Prof Fernanda Pirie, bought their Grade-II listed £1.8m six-bedroom former priory home in in 2018 and began doing it up.
But the couple’s renovation of the 1830s house hit a major setback in 2019 when a section of the adjoining the land of the neighbouring Hawkwell House Hotel collapsed inwards due to a buildup of soil on the hotel side which left the ground there three metres higher than theirs, causing the wall to topple under its weight.
After a trial, a county court judge last year declared the soil buildup a legal “nuisance” and said the hotel owners would have to pay about £200,000 to the couple for the problem to be solved.
But the case then went to , with the hotel owners arguing that their ground should remain at the level it is and a stronger retaining wall built – and the couple claiming that would only result in staff continuing to tower over them on the other side, “smoking and chatting” and breaching their privacy.
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The couple accused the hotel next door of being responsible for the collapse of their wall (Image: Champion News)
As one of Britain’s top experts on Nazi Germany, Magdalen College vice president Prof Stargardt featured on a documentary based on lost home-made footage from Nazi-era and the . His partner, Prof Pirie, is a former barrister and now professor of the anthropology of law at Oxford.
Hawkwell House was the birthplace of explorer, polar medallist and treasure hunter Francis Howard Bickerton, but is now a 77-bed four-star hotel, which describes itself online as “Oxford’s best kept secret”.
The gardens of the two properties were separated by a stone wall, but over time the ground level on the hotel side had been raised so that it was roughly level with the top of the wall, the court heard.
The hotel owners, barrister Benjamin Faulkner appealed against the original order, arguing that she had gone wrong in ordering that the ground level on that side should be lowered.
He said a cheaper solution, involving the ground level remaining the same and a stronger “retaining wall” being built, was the appropriate solution.
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Ruling on the hotel owners’ appeal, Mr Justice Adam Johnson said: “The question whether an injunction imposes obligations which are unduly onerous is a matter going to the proper exercise of discretion.
“Here, the judge was balancing competing interests: on the one hand, the hotel’s interest in having free use of the land on its side of the wall; and on the other hand, the respondents’ interest in bringing to an end the ongoing effects of the appellants’ nuisance.
“The question of onerousness has to be looked at in that context, and the fact is that over time the earth on the hotel side of the wall had been permitted to build up to an unnatural and dangerous level.
“That was the nature of the nuisance the judge found to exist, and it had already caused the [initial] collapse.
“That being so, I agree with Prof Pirie’s submission that there is nothing unduly onerous in requiring the appellants, once the earth on their side of the wall has been reduced to a more acceptable level, to refrain from causing any further build-up in a manner likely to cause yet another nuisance.
“That is a rational response to the nature of the nuisance found.”
He dismissed the hotel owners’ appeal, meaning they will now have to lower the level of the ground on their side of the boundary.