A lower riparian owner sued the Silversprings company for nuisance.
Held: The fact that the plaintiff’s predecessors had acquiesced in pollution for twenty years was no defence, because the plaintiff was not the only person affected by the pollution. There was a wider public interest. Under the legal fiction of lost modern grant: ‘The evidence on both sides satisfies me that the defendants have continually, and down to very recent dates in this year, been committing offences against the Act – in other words, that the user on which they rely as establishing the easement is a user contrary to statute. A lost grant cannot be presumed where such a grant would have been in contravention of a statute, and as title by prescription is founded upon the presumption of a grant, if no grant could lawfully have been made, no presumption of the kind can arise, and the claim must fail.’
As to the claim for a prescriptive right: ‘The progressive increase in the plant in the defendants’ mill and in the volume of water polluted is destructive of that certainty and uniformity essential for the measurement and determination of the user by which the extent of the prescriptive right is to be ascertained.’
Eve J
[1992] 2 Ch 268
Rivers Pollution Prevention Act 1876
England and Wales
Citing:
Applied – Neaverson v Peterborough Rural District Council ChD 1902
The 1812 Act provided for the draining, enclosing and improving of a fen which was common land. Under the Act the grass growing on various roadways was vested in the surveyor of highways, who had power to let it for the pasturage of ‘sound and . .
Cited by:
Cited – Bakewell Management Limited v Brandwood and others HL 1-Apr-2004
Houses were built next to a common. Over many years the owners had driven over the common. The landowners appealed a decision that they could not acquire a right of way by prescription over the common because such use had been unlawful as a criminal . .
These lists may be incomplete.
Updated: 24 June 2021; Ref: scu.193597 br>