A couple have been ordered to pay a £27,000 court bill after they chopped down their next-door neighbour’s hedge to make their flower bed bigger. Tersia and Stiaan Van Zyl were taken to court by neighbour Peter Walker-Smith who accused them of wrongly removing a hedge that separated their properties in Surrey and replacing it with a fence.
They were subsequently sued by Mr Walker-Smith who claimed they had no right to remove the hedge as it wasn’t theirs to remove.
Following a trial at the Central London County Court, the pair were ordered to pay Mr Walker-Smith’s £25,000 costs and pay £2,200 in damages for trespass. They will also have to reposition the fence so that it sits in their garden.
During the trial last month, the court heard that Mr Walker-Smith – who is corporate treasurer for tobacco giant Imperial Brands, the makers of Rizla and Golden Virginia – bought his ground floor flat in Albany Crescent, Claygate, in 2014.
The court heard how the two properties were separated from each other by a holly hedge and keen gardener Mrs Van Zyl wanted to knock it down to expand her flower bed.
Speaking about the reasoning for its removal, Mrs Van Zyl told the court: “The hedge was consuming more or less a third of my flower bed that I wanted to use in a different way.” Acting for the Van Zyls, barrister Lina Mattsson said the couple obtained a surveyor’s report and believed the hedge was on their land.
Mr Walker-Smith disagreed with the hedge removal, but the couple went ahead anyway. Acting for Mr Walker-Smith, barrister Jonathan Willis told the court that the Van Zyls had “unilaterally and outrageously removed the hedge between the parties’ gardens at a time when the parties’ solicitors were corresponding as to the disputed location of the boundary”.
Mr Willis argued: “Mr Walker-Smith’s case is that there was a longstanding hedge, which formed the obvious dividing line between the parties’ gardens. The hedge should have remained, and the parties should have continued to enjoy their respective gardens on either side.”
Mr Willis said that after the hedge was removed, Mr Walker-Smith’s garden felt more “confined” while Mrs Van Zyl claimed he was the “neighbour from hell”. In response, Mr Willis said that Mrs Van Zyl was the real neighbour from hell.
He told the court: “It might be said that Mr Walker-Smith isn’t the neighbour from hell, but that it is the neighbour who has removed a hedge that was there for very many years. He has been goaded by having the hedge removed, despite his desire that it stay.”
After the trial, Judge Alan Saggerson concluded: “Each party has regarded the other as being unreasonable, even spiteful, and had occasion to consider that the other has acted in ways that appear to be deliberately designed to aggravate the other.”
Judge Saggerson ruled in favour of Mr Walker-Smith and criticised the “spiteful” decision made by the Van Zyls to cut down the hedge. He said: “The fence here is in the wrong place. It trespasses on Mr Walker-Smith’s land and it needs to be moved”.
He explained: “As a trespass it needs to be moved to…roughly along a line that would be the middle of the hedge.”
