Laurel and foolhardy
Solicitor landed with £76k legal bill in row over trimmed hedge
A 2ft-wide strip of land between a laurel hedge and a tennis court fence sparked an astonishing legal battle between neighbours.
Now solicitor Julia Lofthouse, 61, faces a bill of £76,000 after losing a court fight over her privacy.
The three-year saga started when her neighbour Nick Hartley, 60, asked a gardener to trim the laurel hedge that divides their properties in esher, Surrey.
The music executive received a letter from Mrs Lofthouse claiming she had been robbed her of her privacy as a result.
Mr Hartley promised the hedge would grow back and even offered to pay for a fence to be put up.
She rejected this offer and put up a wooden barrier to stop Mr Hartley – or his gardener – getting to the 2ft-wide walkway between the hedge and the tennis court.
in a terse letter, Mrs Lofthouse said it was her land. when Mr Hartley removed the barrier, another was put up. He received a letter from Mrs Lofthouse saying she and her husband Mark would keep replacing it.
Mr Hartley took the matter to court, with evidence from a surveyor showing that he owned the strip of land. This week at Central London county court, Judge Mark Raeside QC sided with him and ordered Mrs Lofthouse to pay his legal bills of £46,000.
She is understood to have spent around £30,000 on the case. Last night Mr Hartley told the Mail: ‘They thought they could bully us. All this grief for something which should have been resolved.’
Mr Hartley, director of independent record label PiAS, and his wife Sheila bought their house, now thought to be worth £2.9million, in 2007. At the time, Mrs Lofthouse’s £1.3million bungalow was owned by her father Peter.
She inherited the property and moved in with her husband and son. Relations between the families were cordial at first but in 2017 the battle of the hedge began.
Mrs Lofthouse told the court that the ‘lovely and thick’ laurel was an important feature in her garden until it was ‘thinned considerably’. She added: ‘we now had no privacy.’
Judge Raeside accepted that the hedge must have been maintained from the Hartleys’ side since it had been planted in the 1970s and dismissed Mrs Lofthouse’s claim that the boundary between the properties fell on the line of the tennis court fence. Two surveyors agreed that the legal boundary was across the walkway against the hedge, not the tennis court.
Mr Hartley added: ‘we made numerous offers during the case to settle. we just wanted them to agree so we can all move on. My wife and i have been severely distressed by it.’
Mrs Lofthouse could not be reached for comment.