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In that ruling, town green status was withdrawn after protecting the land from developers for 14 years.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.
He said that, before changes in the law in 2000, ‘locality’ was given a "highly technical and specialised meaning’’ that required the land to be used predominantly by inhabitants of a legally-recognised administrative district.
However, since this area of land was used by residents of two areas, Edgerton and Birkby, he reached the "reluctant conclusion’’ that the application to register it should have failed.
Mr Adamson argues, however, that the law should have been construed in such a way that ‘locality’ be given its ordinary, natural meaning, and that, through the operation of the 1978 Interpretation Act, the singular use of the word should include the plural unless expressly stated otherwise.
He argues that, under the common law that existed before the village green legislation was introduced in 1965, there was no requirement that a ‘locality’ had to be an ‘administrative’ district and that the public from more than one locality could qualify for what were then known as ‘customary greens’.
And he says it was not just for the judge to make the rectification so long after the land was registered as a village green.
He claims that the decision is contrary to the principle of legal certainty and prejudices him and other members of the public.
In his ruling, the High Court judge had explained that the village green rules had been clarified and "relaxed" by subsequent legislation and expressed his "disquiet" about the outcome of this case, which he said was "caused almost entirely by Clayton Fields lying geographically between districts, neighbourhoods, parishes and localities, and by the unsatisfactory state of the law" before 2000.
The appeal – which is being heard together with another town green case from Weymouth – is scheduled to last four days, after which the court is expected to reserve its decision in order to give it in writing at a later date.
