MR JUSTICE NICKLIN Approved Judgment
MBR Acres Ltd -v- Curtin
“… The owner of land adjoining a highway has a right of access to the highway from any part of his premises. This is so whether he or his predecessors originally dedicated the highway or part of it and whether he is entitled to the whole or some interest in the ground subjacent to the highway or not. The rights of the public to pass along the highway are subject to this right of access: just as the right of access is subject to the rights of the public, and must be exercised subject to the general obligations as to nuisance and the like imposed upon a person using the highway.”
75. An interference with this right is actionable per se : Walsh -v- Ervin [1952] VLR 361 . The right is separate from the land-owner’s right, as a member of the public, to utilise the highway itself: Ineos Upstream Ltd -v- Persons Unknown [2017] EWHC 2945 (Ch) [42]. This private right ceases as soon as the highway is reached and any subsequent interference with access to the highway is actionable, if at all, only if it amounts to a public nuisance. In Chaplin -v- Westminster Corporation [1901] 2 Ch 329, 333-334 , Buckley J explained:
“The right which [the claimants] here seek to exercise is a right which they enjoy in common with all other members of the public to use this highway. They have an individual interest which enables them to sue without joining the Attorney-General, in that they are persons who by reason of the neighbourhood of their own premises use this portion of the highway more than others. They have a special and individual interest in the public right to this portion of the highway, and they are entitled to sue without joining the Attorney-General because they sue in respect of that individual interest; but the right which they seek to exercise is not a private right, but a public right. A person who owns premises abutting on a highway enjoys as a private right the right of stepping from his own premises on to the highway, and if any obstruction be placed in his doorway, or gateway, or, if it be a river, at the edge of his wharf, so as to prevent him from obtaining access from his own premises to the highway, that obstruction would be an interference with a private right. But immediately that he has stepped on to the highway, and is using the highway, what he is using is not a private right, but a public right.”
76. The reference to the Attorney-General is to the important principle that an individual cannot, without the consent of the Attorney-General, seek to enforce the criminal law in civil proceedings: Gouriet -v- Union of Post Office Workers [1978] AC 435, 477E-F . Obstruction of the highway is a criminal offence. It does not create a civil cause of action unless the obstruction of the highway amounts to a public nuisance. 77. Ms Bolton submits that the First Claimant, as the owner of the Wyton Site, has an immediate right to access the highway from the Wyton Site to the B1090. Obstruction of this right of access gives rise to a private law claim. 78. I can readily accept that acts of the protestors which deliberately blockade the Wyton Site, preventing vehicles gaining access to or from the highway, would be an infringement of this private right. 79. However, Ms Bolton goes further. She argues that there is no protest right that can justify any interference with the access to the highway. She contends that there is no right to obstruct, slow down or hinder the passage of vehicles exiting the Wyton Site. 80. Put in those absolute terms, I reject this part of Ms Bolton’s submission. As is clear from the passage I have quoted from Marshall (see [74] above), such private law right
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