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Tag: nuisance

Nuisance, amenity and praediality: Fearn’s implications in Scotland

Nuisance, amenity and praediality: Fearn’s implications in Scotland

Published 18th April 2023

by John MacLeod, Senior Lecturer in Private Law at the University of Edinburgh.

The UK Supreme Court’s decision in Fearn v Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery [2023] UKSC 4, [2023] 2 WLR 339 generated an unusual degree of interest for a private law decision with reports and commentary in a number of newspapers (helpfully collated here). Much of this is no doubt due to the Tate being such a well-known institution but the case also represents an interesting development in the law of nuisance.

The claimants were the leaseholders of flats in London directly opposite the viewing gallery at the top of the Blavatnik Building, which is part of the Tate Modern. The flats had floor-to-ceiling windows. This meant that the viewing gallery’s visitors (who numbered several hundred thousand per year) had a direct view into the claimants’ flats. It can readily be imagined that this was undesirable for the claimants but there was considerable doubt about whether they had any remedy of in the law of nuisance.

Doubts focused on two questions: 1) whether “overlooking” can, as a matter of principle, ever amount to a nuisance and 2) how courts should approach the question of determining whether a given interference in a particular case.

Continue readingNuisance, amenity and praediality: Fearn’s implications in Scotland
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Fearn v Tate Gallery Board of Trustees in the Court of Appeal: Curtains for Article 8 rights in the Tort of Private Nuisance?

Published 7th April 2020

The claimants in Fearn v Tate Gallery Board of Trustees were the owners of luxury flats, featuring “striking” floor-to-ceiling windows, adjacent to the Tate Modern on the south bank of the Thames. Residents complained, when giving evidence at first instance, that they felt “more or less constantly watched” by visitors to the gallery’s roof-top viewing platform “as if they were in a zoo”.

Continue readingFearn v Tate Gallery Board of Trustees in the Court of Appeal: Curtains for Article 8 rights in the Tort of Private Nuisance?
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