Judgment handed down in All England Lawn Tennis Ground Ltd v Save Wimbledon Park Ltd

Judgment has been delivered in the case of All England Lawn Tennis Ground Ltd v Save Wimbledon Park Ltd. This was the high profile case determining whether the £200m proposal to extend the Wimbledon Championships into Wimbledon Park was hampered by a statutory trust.  The Court held that it was not.  The Claimant, the All England Club, was represented by James McCreath and Jonathan Chew, led by Jonathan Karas KC of Falcon Chambers, instructed by Nick Wood at CMS.

The issue was whether the Defendants were correct in saying that site former Wimbledon Park Golf Club was subject to rights of the public to use the site for recreation under Public Health Act 1875 s.164. This would have potentially hampered the ability of the Claimant to develop the site for an extension to its famous tennis ground. It was held by the Court that the land was not subject to s.164.

The land had never been used for public recreation and the effect of the local government reorganisation in the mid-1960s was not (as the Defendant claimed) to make the site subject to section 164. Further, even if section 164 had been applied to the site on the local government re-organisation, the Claimant was not bound by that section because the land had never been laid out for public recreation so as to bring public rights into effect as overriding interests on the transfer of the registered title. Accordingly, as registered proprietors, the Claimant would in any event have taken free of s.164 since there were no public rights of recreation capable of amounting to overriding interests.

Read the full judgment