Cases - Sturges v Bridgman
Record details
- Name
- Sturges v Bridgman
- Date
- (1879)
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Easements - Rights of light
- Summary
-
Two houses stood next to one another, the first belonging to confectioners, the second to a doctor. For more than 60 years the confectioners had used a pestle and mortar in their kitchen, causing noise. The doctor had only bought the neighbouring house a few years before action, and built a consulting room close to the confectioners' kitchen. In an action brought by the doctor, the confectioners contended that they had acquired a right to cause the noise (which was found to constitute a nuisance) by prescription. The Court held that no such right had been obtained because, prior to the building of the consulting room, the owner of the doctor's house could not have prevented the use by legal action, and therefore there was insufficient use from which a grant could be presumed.
Thesiger LJ stated, when giving the judgment of the Court of Appeal:
'Consent or acquiescence of the owner of the servient tenement lies at the root of prescription, and of the fiction of a lost grant, and hence the acts or user, which go to the proof of either the one or the other, must be, in the language of the civil law, nec vi, nec clam, nec precario; for a man cannot, as a general rule, be said to consent to or acquiesce in the acquisition by his neighbour of an easement through an enjoyment of which he has no knowledge, actual or constructive, or which he contests and endeavours to interrupt, or which he temporarily licences.'