Rooms with a view: Nicholas Dobson charts the long journey from the High Court to the Supreme Court and back again for Fearn v Tate Gallery Trustees
- The Supreme Court has held that the Tate was liable to the claimants in nuisance, since inviting the public to admire the view from its viewing platform was not a common and ordinary use of the Tate’s land.
- The museum cannot therefore rely on the ‘give and take’ principle and argue that it seeks no more toleration from its neighbours than they would expect the Tate to show for them.
Noël Coward’s 1928 song described a dream love nest: ‘A room with a view/And you/No-one to worry us’ where ‘We’ll gaze at the sky’ and ‘sorrow will never come’. This, however, was not the experience of residents in certain upper-level apartments in the New Bankside development adjacent to the Tate Modern art museum and its Blavatnik Building extension. The living areas of these apartments being extensively glassed, visitors to a public viewing gallery on the top floor of the Blavatnik Building (commanding 360-degree panoramic
