Oxford dons in £200K fight with hotel over staff smoking and chatting

Two Oxford dons are locked in a £200,000 dispute with the owners of a neighbouring hotel over a collapsed wall - and claims staff are 'smoking and chatting' too close to their £1.8m home.  

History professor Nick Stargardt and his partner, anthropologist Prof Fernanda Pirie, bought The Priory, a Grade II listed six-bedroom property in Iffley, in 2018.

As one of Britain’s top experts on Nazi Germany, Magdalen College vice president Prof Stargardt featured on the BBC TV show ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany'.

The pair began renovations but hit a roadblock in 2019 when a short section of the garden wall of the neighbouring Hawkwell House Hotel collapsed inwards.

The professors claimed a buildup of soil on the hotel side had left the ground there three metres higher than theirs, causing the collapse - prompting the couple to rebuild the wall.

The academic couple sued the hotel’s leasehold owner, Hawkwell House Hotel Ltd, and freehold owner, Obbligato Hotels Ltd, when they refused to accept the blame.

But before the case got to court, another larger section of the wall also began to fall apart, with Mr Stargardt and Ms Pirie subsequently suing to have the hotel’s ground level lowered and the wall rebuilt.    

A judge handed victory to the professors last year, declaring the soil buildup a legal “nuisance” and ruling that the hotel owners pay £200,000 to the couple in compensation to pay for the wall.

But the rift is ongoing, with Profs Stargardt and Pirie demanding that the ground on the hotel side be lowered back to its original level to prevent staff in a smoking area from overlooking their front door. 

The hotel owners say their ground level should remain as it is and a stronger retaining wall built - but the couple claim that would only result in staff continuing to loom over them on the other side, “smoking and chatting” and breaching their privacy.

Hawkwell House was the birthplace of explorer, polar medalist and treasure hunter Francis Howard Bickerton, but is now a 77-bed four-star hotel, which describes itself online as “Oxford’s best kept secret.” 

During the initial Oxford County Court trial in 2023, Judge Melissa Clarke heard that over time the ground level on the hotel side had been raised so that it was roughly level with the top of the wall, the court heard.

Following the trial, Judge Clarke found that the soil buildup was a “nuisance,” probably caused by previous owners, and that at the time the wall was built the ground level on the hotel side had been no more than 1.5m higher than the Priory garden.  

She said the higher ground level was a “continuing danger” to the stability of the wall and made an injunction ordering that the hotel owners “batter back” the land, reducing its height on their side.

The ground would then have to be maintained at the rough level that it had been when the wall was originally built, with a slope back up to the hotel itself.

And she also awarded Prof Stargardt and Prof Pirie about £200,000 in damages to allow them to rebuild the crumbling wall as a “garden wall.”

However, the case has continued, with the warring parties going up against each other again at the High Court last week over whether the hotel should have to reduce the level of its grounds. 

For the hotel owners, barrister Benjamin Faulkner appealed against Judge Clarke’s order, arguing that she had gone wrong in ordering that the ground level on that side should be lowered.

He said a cheaper solution, involving the ground level remaining the same and a stronger “retaining wall” being built, was the appropriate solution.

“The judge was wrong to order the appellants to maintain the land at a particular level and at a particular slope in perpetuity,” he told appeal judge, Mr Justice Adam Johnson.

“This is an exceptionally onerous order. It restrains the use that the appellants can make of their land.”

But representing the couple herself, Professor Pirie, a former barrister and now professor of the anthropology of law at Oxford, argued that the judge had got it right and that to allow the hotel to keep its land so much higher than theirs would be to allow them to continue with a nuisance.

“This wall is right outside our front door - it is very close to it,” she told the judge.

“The hotel employees will walk around on top of the wall. It’s their smoking area and they will chat. Really, it’s not an ideal long-term solution.”

She said the couple would not be happy with the retaining wall solution urged by the hotel owners, even if a hedge was planted on the top.

“It’s always been our least favourite solution, primarily because of the privacy concerns and maintaining the hedge,” shesaid.

For the hotel owners, Mr Faulkner said the judge had gone wrong because she had not fully taken account of the difficulties that would be caused by having to reduce the level of the ground on their side.

It could potentially cause issues for drainage systems and buildings on the hotel side and would necessitate protected trees being uprooted, he told the judge.

And he accused the couple of trying to gain an advantage from a case that was never about privacy by bringing up concerns about screening their property.

“They have no right of screening, and they certainly have not pleaded the basis for any such right,” he said.

He added: “Screening is nothing to do with the nuisance complained of. It is the respondents seeking to obtain a collateral advantage in all this.

“It is not the subject of this claim and not something the injunction was directed towards.”

Urging the judge to overturn the injunction compelling the ground to be lowered, he said: “The appellants say that the judge should not have granted a mandatory injunction in such terms.

“Instead, she should have opted for the retaining wall solution, by permitting Prof Pirie and Prof Stargardt to replace the wall with a retaining wall, such that the earth on the hotel side did not need to be permanently battered back.

“The damages ordered should have then reflected the costs of building that retaining wall.”

The court heard Judge Clarke had ordered about £200,000 in damages based on the ground being lowered on the hotel side and a “garden wall” built.

The hotel owners say keeping the ground the same level and building a “retaining wall” to hold back the earth would be cheaper and so the damages should have been lesser.

Alternatively, they could do the work themselves and not have to pay the couple anything, other than about £16,000 spent on rebuilding the small section of wall that fell first.

After a day-long hearing, Mr Justice Adam Johnson reserved his judgment on the dispute to a later date.