South Bank flat owners to take on Tate in Supreme Court hearing
Flat owners near the Tate Modern will take on the gallery at the Supreme Court this week, in a fresh endeavour to block an alleged privacy intrusion.
Some residents of the Neo Bankside development are attempting to appeal previous legal rulings, in a bid to stop “hundreds of thousands of people” from peering into and filming their homes.
At around the same time as the flats on the South Bank were being built, so was an extension to the modern art gallery, known as the Blavatnik Building. The extension has a 360-degree viewing platform,.
The Supreme Court will hear the case Fearna and others v board of trustees of the Tate Gallery on Tuesday morning.
The legal challenges started in 2017, when homeowners applied for an injunction that would require the gallery to limit the view into their homes via cordons or screens. Judges ruled against the flat owners.
Flat owners said visitors would look into homes and post pictures on social media, which residents described as “unreasonably interfering with the claimants’ enjoyment of their flats, so as to be a nuisance”.
In 2019, the high court decided that overlooking theoretically falls within the scope of existing legal protections against neighbourly intrusion into the home.
However, the ruling determined that owners’ decision to live in homes with glass walls in a central location came “at a price” of their privacy. Justice Mann advised owners to put up net curtains, as well as asking the gallery to limit the hours that certain parts of the viewing gallery could be used.
Last year, the court of appeal determined that overlooking could never be considered a private nuisance.
A spokesperson for law firm Forsters said: “This has been a long journey for our clients. From the outset they have only ever sought to limit very intrusive viewing by the public from a section of the viewing gallery, which enables hundreds of thousands of people a year to peer, photograph, and film directly into their homes at close proximity.
They added: “Our clients have therefore taken the difficult decision to appeal, in their continuing attempts to protect their and their families’ right to enjoy their homes free from intolerable intrusion.
A ruling in favour of the flat owners would bolster the tort of nuisance, in addition to legal protections from excessive noise, smells and obstruction of natural light.