The owners of four luxury flats in London – which can easily cost more than 2 million euros – feel spied on by the “hundreds of thousands” of museum visitors on the viewing platform of the famous Tate Modern. The British Supreme Court has now ruled in their favor and has referred the case back to the Supreme Court.
London, like Ostend, also appears to have residents who are not happy with their neighbors because they would cause nuisance. In the capital of the United Kingdom, it concerns residents of the Neo Bankside building on the south bank of the Thames, which is less than 35 meters from the famous Tate Modern museum. Five owners of four flats – Giles Fearn, Gerald Kraftman, Lindsay Urqygart, and Ian and Helen McFadyen – have been embroiled in a legal battle for nearly six years. They find the view into their apartments a “stubborn” invasion of their privacy and demand that the museum should “close off” certain parts of the terrace so that visitors can no longer look inside.
The residents lost their lawsuit before the Supreme Court and before the Court of Appeal. But the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United Kingdom, overturned that verdict yesterday by a three-to-two majority. Even the lower courts, according to George Leggatt, one of the Supreme Court judges, had already determined that the apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows “were in view of the viewing platform for much of the day, every day of the week of the Tate”. “It’s easy to imagine how oppressive living in such conditions would feel to any normal human being – like being put on display in a zoo.”
According to Judge Leggatt, the viewing platform at Tate Modern is not a “normal” use of the museum’s land and is therefore not necessarily part of the function of an art museum. He ruled that you can legally speak of “nuisance” for the owners of the luxury apartments, including by museum visitors who enjoy the view from the terrace and take photos. Leggatt added that the five residents bought their flat in 2013 and 2014, while the Blavatnik wing of the Tate Modern, where the contested terrace is located, only opened in 2016. It was previously argued in court that the project developers of the flats knew that Tate Modern would build the viewing platform, but “did not foresee the consequences”. According to Judge Leggatt, that was irrelevant to the appeal case.
The entire lawsuit now goes back to the Supreme Court, which must rule on a solution for the owners of the apartments. According to their lawyers, they are willing to work with Tate Modern to find a practical solution that everyone can agree with. For Leggatt, it certainly doesn’t mean that owners have to put some sort of protection, such as curtains, over their windows. Although another judge finds that “owners in this part of London can expect to see in to an important degree and that the risk of people peering through their windows from neighboring properties in this area is an inevitable part of living together”. There it sounds: “It is a normal expectation that people use curtains, blinds or other shielding to limit any nuisance”.
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