Millionaire neighbours at war over 3ft of disputed garden

A heated battle over a three-foot strip of land has resulted in a lawsuit between two neighbouring millionaire couples.

An artist and her lawyer partner have been accused of taking a piece of garden and paving over it between their million-pound house and the £1.4m Victorian home of their neighbours, and are now being sued, reports the Mirror.

Wendy Mszyca, 58, and Amanda Uziell-Hamilton, 65, say they were reclaiming what used to be their flower bed, but Jay and Hannah Stirrett don’t agree and have accused them of staging a land-grab.

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The Stirretts say the couple took out a fence and paved another three feet back towards their house and are now suing at Central London County Court for return of the strip, which they say is “significant”.

Outlining the case, the Stirretts’ barrister, Tom Morris, told Judge David Saunders the couple had bought their four-bedroom house in Crofton Road, Camberwell and moved in 2015. The other couple’s £1m-plus home is in Shenley Road.

When the Stirretts moved in, there was a rendered wall at the back of their garden. They are adamant it was not on the correct boundary line, but had been built about three feet inside their garden area.

The true boundary, they say, was a wooden fence three feet behind the wall, marking the end of the other couple’s garden until they had removed it and paved up to the Stirretts’ wall in 2018.

Mr Morris claimed the wall constructed by builders on the Stirretts’ property before they bought it is entirely within their garden and only put there to avoid a clash with Mszyca and Uziell-Hamilton.

Giving evidence, Jay 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.

And his next-door neighbour, author Jeremy Fox, backed him up, telling the judge he had often in the past been into their garden and that the wall had been built three feet into it.

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He had watched as the builder put up 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 Mszyca and Uziell-Hamilton.

Mszyca and Uziell-Hamilton’s barrister Ezra MacDonald insisted the wall was the end of the Stirretts’ garden and that his clients had not encroached onto their property.

The Stirretts 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.

Mszyca and 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.

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