After being accused of stealing three feet of their affluent neighbors’ garden and paving over it, an artist and her legal partner are engaged in a physical altercation.
Wendy Mszyca, 58, and Amanda Uziell-Hamilton, 65, are charged with conducting a land grab for the little plot of land separating their million-dollar mansion from their next-door neighbors Jay and Hannah Stirrett’s £1.4 million Victorian home.
The Stirretts claim that while renovating their garden in 2018, the other couple demolished a fence and paved an additional three feet back towards the Stirretts’ house.
The Stirretts’ neighbors’ properties are designed with gardens backing onto each other in Camberwell, a neighborhood in south London.
The strip, which they claim is “significant” in a part of London where homes are expensive and gardens are small and valuable, is the subject of their current lawsuit at Central London County Court.
Their neighbors, however, dispute that the Stirretts own the property and assert that they were merely reclaiming what was once their flower bed before it was briefly fence off by contractors in 2013.
Tom Morris, the Stirretts’ attorney, explained the case to Judge David Saunders, stating that the couple had moved into their four-bedroom Camberwell home in 2015 after purchasing it.
Mrs. Stirrett is a vice president at a US-based human resources firm, while Mr. Stirrett is an engineer.
Ms. Uziell-Hamilton teaches law while Ms. Mszyca is a fine artist who specializes in multimedia and photography.
The Stirretts claim that the rendered wall that was there when they first moved in was actually built about three feet inside of their garden area rather than on the correct boundary line.
According to them, the other couple’s garden ended at a wooden fence three feet beyond the wall until it was controversially removed and paved up to the Stirretts’ wall in 2018.
The defendants “caused the fence to be removed sometime around August 2018 and paved over the strip of land between it and the block wall, incorporating that land into their garden,” Mr. Morris said in his statement to the judge.
The wall that was built on the Stirretts’ property before they purchased it, according to Mr. Morris, is entirely within their garden and was only placed there to prevent a dispute with Ms. Mszyca and Ms. Uziell-Hamilton.
The fence in Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-garden, Hamilton’s which had been removed by their neighbors when they installed the paving, served as the real boundary despite the wall’s presence.
He informed the judge, “The claimants’ position is that the block wall was entirely built to the east of the old fence and entirely upon the claimants’ property.”
“The construction of the block wall created the disputed land, a strip of land between the block wall and the old fence.
‘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 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 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.
But 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.
And he said it was inherently unlikely that a builder working for a developer would readily give up valuable garden area just to avoid a row with some neighbours.
‘It is astonishingly unlikely that a contractor working for a developer building a wall would put that wall up in the place where the neighbours told him to put it,’ he told the judge.
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.
‘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.’
Mr and Mrs Stirrett are suing for a declaration that the boundary between the properties is about three feet away from the wall, along the line of their neighbours’ old fence, and for possession of the strip of ground.
Ms Mszyca and Ms Uziell-Hamilton are countersuing for a declaration that they own all the land up to the Stirretts’ wall.
The judge will give a decision on the case at a later date.