A man's legal heirs fought for over two decades to make a neighbouring school remove a wall and lintel encroaching on his property, only to see the High Court twice try to convert their injunction decree into a cash payout no one had asked for. The Supreme Court set this right for the second time.
"My father built our house and lived in peace for years until the school next door put up a wall right on our common open space — blocking the air and light from our ventilators and choking off the path our water used to drain through. When he objected, they didn't stop. They even ran a lintel of their own school building straight into our wall, as if our property was theirs to build on. He went to court and won — twice, at the trial stage and again on appeal. And then the High Court, of all things, told us we had to accept money for it, money we never asked for, as if our home could just be priced out and the encroachment made permanent by paying us off. My father has since passed, and now it falls to us, his children, to finish what he started: not to be paid off, but to get our wall back, our light back, our water path back. We never wanted their money. We wanted our encroachment removed."
Moral Universe
The family frames this as a simple matter of trespass and fairness: you don't get to build on someone else's land and then buy your way out of removing it, especially when the one wronged wants his property restored, not compensated.
Emotional Driver
A sense of prolonged injustice and disbelief — winning twice in the courts below only to have the remedy quietly rewritten by the High Court into something the family never sought.
Objective
Restoration of the original decree directing actual removal of the encroaching wall and lintel, not monetary compensation.
Blind Spots
The narrative does not engage with the practical costs and disruption of tearing down a long-standing structure, or with the school's likely (unheard) side of events, since the defendants did not appear before the Supreme Court.
Inherent Tensions
- —Tension between a decades-old physical structure (the wall, now arguably relied upon by the school) and the plaintiff's insistence on strict enforcement of a removal decree.
- —Tension between the High Court's instinct toward a practical, monetary resolution and the family's insistence on their right to choose the remedy actually pleaded and decreed.