Millionaire couple sue neighbours... over 3ft f lower bed
AN ARTIST and her partner are locked in a court battle with their millionaire neighbours after being accused of stealing 3ft of garden and paving over it.
Wendy Mszyca, 58, and Amanda Uziell-Hamilton, 65, are accused of staging a land grab over the strip of ground between their million-pound house and the £1.4 million home of Jay and Hannah Stirrett.
The properties in Camberwell, south London, are built with gardens backing on to each other and the Stirretts say that while redoing their garden in 2018, the other couple removed a fence and paved another three feet back towards the Stirretts’ house.
They are suing at Central London County Court for the return of the strip, which – despite its size – they say is ‘significant’ in an area where properties are expensive and gardens are small.
Miss Mszyca and Miss UziellHamilton, a lawyer, say they simply reclaimed what used to be their flower bed before it was temporarily fenced off by builders in 2013.
The Stirretts’ barrister, Tom Morris, told Judge David Saunders that the couple bought their four-bedroom house in 2015. Mr Stirrett is an engineer, while his wife is a vice-president at a US-based human resources company.
When the Stirretts moved in, there was a rendered wall at the back of their garden, but they say it was not on the correct boundary line, and had in fact been built about 3ft inside their garden. The true boundary, they say, was a wooden fence 3ft behind the wall, marking the end of the other couple’s garden until they removed it and paved up to the wall in 2018.
Giving evidence, Mr Stirrett said he had always considered the boundary between the properties to be in line with others in the street, following the line of the fence removed by his neighbours.
His next-door neighbour, author Jeremy Fox, backed him up, telling the judge that he had often been in the Stirretts’ garden before they moved in and the wall had been built 3ft into it.
Mr Fox said he watched the builder erect the wall. When he went to tell him it was in the wrong place, the builder said it was because he wanted to avoid trouble with Miss Mszyca and Miss Uziell-Hamilton.
For Miss Mszyca and her partner, barrister Ezra MacDonald said the wall was the end of the Stirretts’ garden and his clients had not encroached on to their property. The judge will give a decision on the case at a later date.