How the Notting Hill rich live - 23/11/06

What a strange lot the rich folk up the hill are! Here’s a couple of neighbours who’ve been battling it out in the courts over one of them kicking a football about in the communal gardens with his five year old boy.

‘Communal gardens?’, I hear you say. Do rich folks have communal gardens? A word of explanation. In the wealthy, stuccoed terraces of Notting Hill, there are large garden areas between the rows of houses.

In most neighbourhoods these would be public parks. But that’s not good enough for the fancy-pants millionaires around here. So these gardens are private and the only way you can get into them is by buying a property with access rights attached.

But on with the story. A couple of years ago, Ms Paula Lawton, 63, of Elgin Crescent saw Mr Christopher Fleming-Brown, 46, and also of Elgin Crescent, kicking a football with his five-year-old son in the Elgin Arundel gardens. Having witnessed what to her mind was a clear breach of the 1863 Town Gardens Protection Act, she launched a private prosecution against him.

Ms Lawton, a former Sunday school teacher and medical administrator, lives alone in a £450,000 one bedroom garden flat (no, I have not put in too many noughts). Mr Fleming-Brown is a city banker and lives with his wife and family in a £2.5 million, five-bedroom house.

The case ended up in West London Magistrates Court last November. A judge there ruled that the city banker and his lad had not been playing football since there were only two of them – not two teams.

The former Sunday school teacher appealed and pursued the case to a hearing this week at the High Court before Lord Justice Waller, sitting with Mr Justice Treacy. They said that the previous judge had been wrong; there had been a game of football, even if only two people were involved. But they threw the case out anyway, as not being in the public interest. And it turns out that, in any case, the garden bylaws have been changed to allow parents to play ball games with their children.

In language unusually intemperate for a solicitor, Andrew Gregg, who acted for Mr Fleming-Brown, said of Ms Lawton: ‘In my view she's an interfering little busy body and the court should not have put up with it. The case was an absurd waste of public money.’

Ms Lawton said: 'I'm just protecting my garden. It is worth protecting. This is an ornamental garden and not a recreation ground and football ruins the grass. I tried to speak to Mr Fleming-Brown and I wrote him letters but he ignored me totally. I am pleased the High Court recognised that two people constitutes a game of football even if they overturned my case.'

I don’t know what I find funniest here. I’m delighted that you can be a millionaire banker, but get sued for having a kickabout with your kid. And I’m thrilled that living on Elgin Crescent, after forking out a king’s ransom for your house, you’ve got Paula Lawton for a neighbour. Allegedly, she is engaged in multiple legal proceedings against various neighbours.

I suppose I could get angry at the fact that Lord Justice Waller, sitting with Mr Justice Treacy saw fit to have the costs of the case, estimated at £50,000, paid from the public purse rather than awarding them against Ms Lawton. But that would seem churlish.

I mean, fifty grand divided between all of us seems a small sum to pay for this hilarious insight into the daily lives of the rich up in Elgin Crescent.