A RETIRED teacher has taken the fight to preserve a six-acre field on the edge of Huddersfield as a town green to London’s Appeal Court.
Jonathan Adamson is taking on a multi-million pound developer to save Clayton Fields in a test case challenge to a High Court ruling last summer.
In that ruling, town green status was withdrawn after protecting the land from developers for 14 years.
Now Mr Adamson, 61, of Cemetery Road, Edgerton, is asking the Court of Appeal to overturn High Court judge Mr Justice Vos’s ruling that the land should never have been registered as a town green and thereby protected from development.
Last June, the judge backed a claim by landowner Paddico (267) Ltd and ordered rectification of the register of town and village greens maintained by Kirklees Council to remove the area of grassland known as Clayton Fields in the otherwise densely built-up Edgerton district.
The council had registered it as long ago as 1997.
The decision opened the way to pursue planning permission for potentially lucrative development which would drastically increase the value of its land.
However, Mr Adamson now says the judge was wrong to hold that the registration should not have been made.
The judge ruled that Clayton Fields should never have been registered as a town green in 1997 due to restrictive laws that were in place at the time. These meant that, in order to qualify as a town or village green, an area of land had to be used for recreation as of right by the residents of a ‘locality’ for a continuous period of 20 years.
