Neighbours new fence blocking access

GrumpyDil

Which is why the key is to determine if each neighbour has the right to use the other's to drive across? 

HampshireH

It sounds like these houses and drives weren't designed to have garages.

If your garage is so far back you cannot access it via your own land & only by crossing theirs that's not really the neighbours fault 

Providing they are adjoined and not shared (as a previous post says) with no right of way then your garage will have to become storage rather than parking.

sheramber

HampshireH said:

It sounds like these houses and drives weren't designed to have garages.

If your garage is so far back you cannot access it via your own land & only by crossing theirs that's not really the neighbours fault 

Providing they are adjoined and not shared (as a previous post says) with no right of way then your garage will have to become storage rather than parking.

Maybe the garage was supposed to built further  back  but the previous owner chose to build it further forward.

Mac_70_

Sounds like the pervious owner didn't think about the position of the garage when building it, and relied on the good will of the neighbour letting him have access to his drive to enter/exit the garage.

Personally i don't blame the son for putting a fence down the drive. What happens if your neighbour parks his car where you need to cross over to get in or out of your garage, or you going to knock his door and say sorry, could you move your car that's on your own property to let me out of my garage?   

74jax

Mac_70_ said:

Sounds like the pervious owner didn't think about the position of the garage when building it, and relied on the good will of the neighbour letting him have access to his drive to enter/exit the garage.

Personally i don't blame the son for putting a fence down the drive. What happens if your neighbour parks his car where you need to cross over to get in or out of your garage, or you going to knock his door and say sorry, could you move your car that's on your own property to let me out of my garage?   

I agree. I really can't picture the layout at all. 

RAS

This set up is far from uncommon round here in houses built post-war, a drive way, usually comprising two ribbons of concrete between two houses, wide enough only for one vehicle leading to two garages at the rear of the houses. Don't know the legalities of the boundaries but could perfectly see it being between the "tracks". Requires a fence/gate between each garage and corner of its house to secure the garden.

OP you really do need both sets of deeds, probably going right back to when the houses were built.

sheramber

We had this layout in our last house .

Two blocks of semi detached houses 1, 2,3,4,  each house has a drive at the side so the houses are joined and the drives between the two inside houses are side by side.
                                                                                  
D 1,2 D, D3,4D. We were no 3 with a fence between the two drives.  2D fence 3D.
There is no sharing of drives. 

Our drive was wide enough to take a car past the house but You had to park over the to the fence side to allow the driver's door to be opened.

Then you could not open the door on the passenger side due to the restricted width because of the fence between the drives. 

Whoever built our garage  built it  leaving a gap of   11/2 metres between the back of the house and the garage.   The garage was slightly wider than the house so the door was offset to the drive. You need to turn at the last minute to line up with the garage door. That was all right going in, but reversing out was tricky as you were liable to scratch the car on the corner of the house as you  manoeuvered out into the tight space.

My neighbour had no problem as his garage was built further back giving him  plenty of  space in front of his garage .

Garages were not built with the houses. Each owner built there own.  Most were built into the back garden but , of course, that cutt eh size of the back garden. 

There were no fences installed by the builder. Again these  were added by some people, possibly to keep pets or children safe.

Jeepers_Creepers

Sadly, Lrb seems coy on details.

He acknowledges that the neighb has put up this fence on their own side of the boundary, so that was fair of the neighb. I can also understand why the neighb would want to tidy up the plot for sale, in a legally watertight as well as cosmetic way; grey areas are a 'mare. And having to sell a property where the buyer knows the first thing they'll need to do is either address their neighb driving partly over their boundary or else suck it up, is not a good start. These arrangements are fine for long-term neighbs who get on, which was probably the original arrangement.

You cannot rely on such arrangements continuing, and it doesn't take much to make these things really awkward. Even if the new neighb is a lovely person and Lrb gets on well with them, it'll be a very awkward day when Lrb approaches the idea of the fence coming down...

Apart from the deeds making allowances for this - which is extremely unlikely as the deeds will pre-date the garages - the only other option is whether there has been a 'RoW' obtained by continued use. This will surely be deeply murky legal territory.

I think Lrb needs to buy a Ziggy.