A wealthy couple who claimed 3ft of their neighbour's garden as their own have been ordered to hand it back. Artist, Wendy Mszyca, 58 and her lawyer partner, Amanda Uziell-Hamilton, 66 were accused of paving over a narrow strip of ground that separated their home from Jay and Hannah Stirrett's £1.4m Victorian property next door in South London.
The disagreement initially began when the couple made the decision to revamp their garden which slightly backs onto their affluent neighbours land as well, the Mirror reports. The accused couple were also said to have apparently got rid of a fence in 2018 and paved another 3ft towards the Stirett's property in Camberwell, South London.
The Stirretts sued their neighbours and won their case at Central London Country Court after a judge ordered Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell Hamilton to return the ''wholly unusuable, inaccessible strip of land'' located behind the back wall of their garden. Judge David Saunders said "considerable ill-feeling" had been caused by the neighbours' row, which could now see Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton having to pick up a massive lawyers' bill for the case.
Outlining the dispute during the trial in June, the Stirretts' barrister Tom Morris said the couple had bought their four-bedroom house and moved in 2015. Mr Stirrett is an engineer, while Mrs Stirrett is a vice president at a US-based human resources company.
Their neighbour to the rear Ms Mszyca is a fine artist specialising in multimedia and photography, while Ms Uziell-Hamilton is a law lecturer training support lawyers. When the Stirretts moved in, there was a rendered wall at the back of their garden.
They insisted that it was not on the correct boundary line, but had in fact been built about three feet inside their garden area. The true boundary, they said, was a wooden fence three feet behind the wall, marking the end of the other couple's garden until they had controversially removed it and paved up to the Stirretts' wall in 2018.
Mr Morris told the judge: "In around August 2018, the defendants caused the fence to be removed, and paved over the strip of land between it and the block wall, incorporating that land into their garden." He claimed that the wall constructed by builders on the Stirretts' property before they bought it is entirely within their garden and only put there to avoid an argument between the developer and Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton.
Despite the wall being there, the true boundary was the fence in Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton's garden, which had been removed by their neighbours when they laid the paving. "The claimants' position is that the block wall was constructed entirely to the east of the old fence and entirely upon the claimants' property," he told the judge.
"The erection of the block wall created a strip of land between the block wall and the old fence - the disputed land. The claimants' case is that the old fence remained in situ and continued to demarcate the disputed boundary.
"Even if the old fence was replaced, the claimants' position is that it followed the line of the boundary." Giving evidence, Mr Stirrett said he had always considered the boundary between the properties to be in line with others separating gardens in the street, following the line of the fence removed by his neighbours.
"The boundary was on the fence line, in line with everyone else's garden," he said. And his next-door neighbour, author Jeremy Fox, backed him up, telling the judge that he had often in the past been into their garden before they moved in and that the wall had been built three feet into it.
He had watched from his top floor writing room as the builder erected the wall and, when he went to tell him he was in the wrong place, was told it was because he wanted to avoid trouble with Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton. "He told me he had some kind of disagreement with the occupiers of the rear property and he couldn't be bothered with it, so he put it where he did," he told the judge.
For Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton, barrister Ezra MacDonald insisted that the wall was the end of the Stirretts' garden and that his clients had not encroached onto their property. The fence in their garden had been put up by the builders to give them some privacy while the wall was constructed, but was in fact fully inside their garden and had effectively cut them off from what had been their flower bed.
He said it was obvious that the wall in the Stirretts' property is the end of their garden and that everything beyond it belonged to Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton. "When Mr and Mrs Stirrett purchased their property in 2015, the garden...was clearly bounded by a permanent, rendered, block wall," he said.
"There was no access to the strip of land between the block wall and the fence behind. It would have been abundantly clear to any reasonable layman that he was buying the property up to, and bounded by, the block wall.
"The true legal boundary is - and always has been - along the west face of the block wall." He added: "No reasonable layman would have believed that they were acquiring this wholly unusable, inaccessible strip of land in addition to the prepared and finished garden area."
Giving judgment this week, Judge Saunders said the row over the boundary had created "ill-feeling" between the two couples, but that both couples had done their best to help him in giving their evidence. However, he found Mr Stirrett's evidence more "precise" as he had relied on actual photographs of the disputed area in order to back his case that it belonged to him and his wife.
Finding in the Stirretts' favour, he said that they were right that the true boundary between the two gardens runs along the line of the fence, meaning the land is part of their garden despite being behind their back wall. That would mean the boundary between the two gardens followed the same line as walls separating other gardens in the two streets when they were originally built.
"It is more likely than not that the developers at that time would have constructed the rear walls to the properties in a straight line with a continuous back wall passing between the properties," he said. "I find for the claimants.
''The appropriate relief is for me to declare that the boundary is as shown on the plan annexed to the claimants' particulars of claim, which I recommend be subject to a proper survey to determine its accuracy. In addition, I order an injunction restraining the defendants from trespassing on the land, together with an order for possession of the disputed land."
The judge said a further hearing would be held to decide on who pays the costs of the trial.
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