The vendors were trustees for sale of a mansion-house and property, known as the Mill Hill estate, and some adjoining pieces of land and sold two of the adjoining pieces in 1845. The conveyance contained a covenant by the purchaser with the vendors, their heirs, executors, administrators and assigns, including a restriction on building within a certain distance of a road ‘leading to the Mill Hill house and property belonging to the said trustees’, but did not state that this covenant was for the protection of the residential property, or in reference to the other adjoining pieces of land, or make any statement or reference thereto. Held The court upheld the judgment below. James LJ said: ‘To enable an assign to take the benefit of restrictive covenants, there must be something in the deed to define the property for the benefit of which they were entered into. Supposing I were now framing the deed afresh I should not have the remotest idea how the covenant ought to be framed, as I cannot tell what the property was which the parties intended to be protected, and within what limits.’
James LJ
(1879) 11 Ch D 866
England and Wales
Citing:
Appeal from – Renals v Cowlishaw 1879
The word ‘assigns’ was used to denote the successors in title to the land both of the original restrictive covenantor and of the original covenantee.
Held: this was insufficient to enable a subsequent owner of the Mill Hill estate who did not . .
Cited by:
Cited – University of East London Higher Education Corporation v London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and others ChD 9-Dec-2004
The University wanted to sell land for development free of restrictive covenants. It had previously been in the ownership of both the servient and dominant land in respect of a restrictive covenant. The Borough contended that the restrictive . .
Cited – Elliston v Reacher ChD 1908
The court was asked whether a building scheme had been established.
Held: It had. The court set out the factors which must be shown to establish a building scheme on an estate; Both plaintiff and defendant’s titles must derive from the same . .
Cited – Small v Oliver and Saunders (Developments) Ltd ChD 25-May-2006
The claimant said his property had the benefit of covenants in a building scheme so as to allow him to object to the building of an additional house on a neighbouring plot in breach of a covenant to build only one house on the plot. Most but not all . .
Cited – Bath Rugby Ltd v Greenwood and Others CA 21-Dec-2021
This appeal concerns the question whether an area of land in Bath known as the Recreation Ground, commonly called ‘the Rec’, is still subject to a restrictive covenant imposed in a conveyance of the Rec dated 6 April 1922 (‘the 1922 conveyance’). . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Land
Updated: 22 December 2021; Ref: scu.220703