Where land is held for statutory education purposes those purposes are incompatible with registration of the land as a town or village green.
The High Court has considered this principle in Cotham School v Bristol City Council & Anor [2025] EWHC 1382 (Ch).
The case concerned Stoke Lodge playing fields in north-west Bristol, registered as a town green under the Commons Act 2006 in August 2023. The claimant, an academy school was granted a long lease of the playing fields by the council in 2011, for use as school playing fields. The leased land and the registered land largely overlapped.
The school wished to control the land including its fences and gates to ensure its use as school playing fields and for local recreation and sought to cancel the registration under section 14 of the Commons Registration Act 1965. The residents wanted unrestricted access to the land.
Section 15 of the 2006 Act allows any person to apply to register land as a town or village green where a significant number of inhabitants have indulged as of right in lawful sports and pastimes on the land for at least 20 years. The use must not be contentious, in secret or with permission.
The court decided that the statutory education purposes for which the land was held were incompatible with registration of the land as a town or village green and it should not have been registered.
However, if this was wrong the claimant succeeded for the following reasons:
- User was not as of right – there were prohibitory signs at entrances to the land warning members of the public “not to trespass” which were sufficient to render the use contentious.
- Objections by the claimant to a previous village green application were sufficient to render the subsequent use of the land contentious.
- The claimant’s lease did not prevent the school from stopping the public from using the land for informal recreation but, if it did, use of the land would have been permissive and not as of right.
- Use of the playing fields by the claimant or other sports clubs for organised sport displaced members of the public and so there had not been continuous use of the land for 20 years.
- If the public interfered with the playing of games by the school on the land this would be unlawful under section 547 of the Education Act 1996.
It was just to rectify the register by deleting the entry relating to the land.
Louise Clark is a property law consultant
