Cases - Harris v De Pinna
Record details
- Name
- Harris v De Pinna
- Date
- (1886)
- Citation
- 33 ChD 238
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Easements - Prescription Act 1832, s. 3 - Rights of light
- Summary
-
This case concerned section 3 of the Prescription Act. The plaintiffs were timber merchants, and the defendants were the occupiers of the adjoining premises. On the plaintiffs' premises were structures used for the storage and seasoning of wood, and also for exhibiting the wood to customers. These structures consisted of solid baulks of upright timber fixed in stone bases on brick piers, with cross-beams and diagonal iron braces, and were divided into floors or stagings which had open unglazed ends between the uprights and which served to admit air for drying and also light.
At first instance Chitty J held that the structure was not a 'building' within the meaning of section 3 of the Prescription Act, and the plaintiffs' claim failed on that basis. On appeal, without deciding whether the structure was a building, the Court of Appeal said that the consequence of the nature of the structure, and the mode of carrying on business, meant that from time to time timber would be piled to block one or other of the apertures so that the plaintiffs could not prove that there had been uninterrupted access of light by any one aperture for the statutory period. Accordingly the claim failed on this basis.
Perhaps most fundamentally of all, the right only confers an entitlement to sufficient light.