Two Oxford dons have won a £200,000 row with the owners of a neighbouring hotel over a collapsed garden wall and claims its staff are ‘smoking and chatting’ too close to their £1.8million house.
History Prof Nick Stargardt, who appeared on the BBC, and his anthropologist partner, Prof Fernanda Pirie, sued the owners of the Hawkwell House Hotel for damages after a part of the wall between the two properties gave away.
The academic couple bought their Grade-II listed six-bedroom former priory home in Oxford in 2018 and began doing it up.
But renovations of their 1830s house hit a major setback in 2019 when a section of the garden wall adjoining the collapsed inwards.
The professors claimed a buildup of soil on the hotel side had left the ground there three metres higher than theirs, causing the wall to topple under its weight, and ended up in a court battle when the hotel owners refused to accept the blame.
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 the High Court, 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.
Handing victory to the couple this week, Mr Justice Adam Johnson made an order which will require the hotel to lower the level of the ground on their side of the wall and maintain it there.
That would protect the academic couple from the risk of the soil building back up and causing a rebuilt wall to collapse again in the future, he said.
Pictured: History Prof Nick Stargardt, who appeared on the BBC and his anthropologist partner, Prof Fernanda Pirie, outside London’s High Court
An aerial view of the Oxford dons’ £1.8m Grade II listed home (left) and the Hawkwell Hotel (right). showing the site of the disputed wall and the hotel smoking area where the couple say staff members smoke and chat
The Priory in Iffley, Oxford, the Grade-II listed six-bedroom property owned by Professors Nick Stargardt and Fernanda Pirie
During the initial Oxford County Court trial last year, Judge Melissa Clarke heard that the couple bought the historic priory, in the leafy Iffley suburb, in 2018, next door to Hawkwell House.
As one of Britain’s top experts on Nazi Germany, Magdalen College vice president Prof Stargardt featured on a BBC documentary based on lost home made footage from Nazi-era Germany and the Second World War. 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.
After moving in, a short section of the wall collapsed under the weight of the soil next door in 2019, prompting the couple to rebuild and sue the hotel’s leasehold owner, Hawkwell House Hotel Ltd, and freehold owner, Obbligato Hotels Ltd.
But before the case got to court, another larger section of the wall also began to fall apart, with them then suing to have the hotel’s ground level lowered and about £200,000 compensation to pay for a wall rebuild.
Following the trial, Judge Clarke found that the soil buildup was a ‘nuisance,’ probably caused by previous owners, and that at the time the wall was built the ground level on the hotel side had been no more than 1.5m higher than the Priory garden.
She said the higher ground level was a ‘continuing danger’ to the stability of the wall and made an injunction ordering that the hotel owners ‘batter back’ the land, reducing its height on their side.
Hawkwell House Hotel in Iffley, Oxford, the hotel at the centre of the dispute, describes itself as ‘Oxford’s best kept secret’
An exterior view of the Priory, a six-bedroom home which dates back to the 1830s and is valued at £1.8m
The ground would then have to be maintained at the rough level that it had been when the wall was originally built, with a 45 degree slope back up to the hotel itself.
And she also awarded Prof Stargardt and Prof Pirie about £200,000 in damages to allow them to rebuild the crumbling wall as a ‘garden wall.’
However, the case continued, with the warring parties going up against each other again at the High Court last month over whether the hotel should have to reduce the level of its grounds.
For the hotel owners, barrister Benjamin Faulkner appealed against Judge Clarke’s 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.
The order to batter back the earth and maintain a specific slope was ‘exceptionally onerous,’ he added.
And he accused the couple of trying to gain an advantage from a case that was never about privacy by bringing up concerns about screening their property.
‘They have no right of screening, and they certainly have not pleaded the basis for any such right,’ he said.
Oxford history professor Nick Stargardt speaking on the BBC documentary ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’
He added: ‘Screening is nothing to do with the nuisance complained of. It is the respondents seeking to obtain a collateral advantage in all this.
‘It is not the subject of this claim and not something the injunction was directed towards.’
But representing the couple herself, Prof Pirie argued that the judge had got it right and that to allow the hotel to keep its land so much higher than theirs would be to allow them to continue with a nuisance.
‘This wall is right outside our front door – it is very close to it,’ she told the judge.
‘The hotel employees will walk around on top of the wall. It’s their smoking area and they will chat.
‘Really, it’s not an ideal long-term solution.’
She said the couple would not be happy with the retaining wall solution urged by the hotel owners, even if a hedge was planted on the top.
‘It’s always been our least favourite solution, primarily because of the privacy concerns and maintaining the hedge,’ she argued.
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.