Derbyshire County Council did this in April 2023 because the car park on the other side was going up for sale as a small housing site. Block the gap, tidy the asset, hope the retired teacher gets bored. She did not. The fence panel came out within a year. The vehicle access did not. For the rest of the fight she was left threading a route the council later marked with concrete blocks, which is the civic equivalent of being invited back to the party and asked to sit on a breeze block.
The judge, Robert Brown, found some of the council’s evidence surprisingly combative, totally irrelevant and most unhelpful. That is legal-speak for “please stop.” Costs: £50,000, to be paid by the council, which has declined to say what the whole performance actually cost. Helene, a retired teacher of nine, ten and eleven-year-olds, said she never expected the council to act so babyish. When a woman who has marked spelling tests for a living calls your strategy childish, you should sit down.
I do not doubt that car parks need selling and housing needs building. I do doubt that the fastest route there is to concrete someone into their own garden and then argue about the 1960s. If your official process is a metal panel and a three-year wait, people will invent a smaller, louder one and take it to a tribunal. They have. A right of way is now written down. The gap is a gap again.
If your own wall is feeling insecure, Amazon will sell you a wooden garden gate. It will not stop a council with a sale board. It will at least be a gate, which is more than Matlock was offered for a while.
Britain is very good at this. We can map a county to the nearest centimetre and still lose a decade arguing about a hole in a wall. Ninety-eight centimetres. Remember that the next time a press officer says they were only trying to be helpful.
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