In the spring of 1988 construction started on One Canada Square, the distinctive tower at the centre of the Canary Wharf development. Within a few months of work starting, people living to the northeast of the site began to complain of interference with their television signal. A group of 690 people brought an action in private nuisance against the developers and sought to recover damages from them.
Where is it on the map?
At point M.
Who won?
The developers.
The House of Lords rejected the idea that causing interference to a person's television reception was capable of being an actionable nuisance. They also reversed the Court of Appeal's ruling that people who did not have a 'proprietary interest in land' could bring an action in private nuisance.
What's the principle of law?
Private nuisance is usually caused by something 'emanating' from a person's land. A classic example of this is where emissions emanating from a factory cause nuisance at a neighbouring property (see Tipping v St Helens Smelting Co. (1865) L.R. 1 Ch.App. 66). In the present case, there was nothing emanating from the tower: it was simply in the way of the television signals. The Law Lords ruled that it would be wrong to hold that Canary Wharf Ltd had created a nuisance simply by building on their own land.
The second important principle to be found in the House of Lords' judgment is that a person can only bring a claim in private nuisance if they have 'a proprietary interest' in the land that is suffering the alleged nuisance. This usually means that the claimant must own the land. In the present case, not all the claimants had proprietary interests in the land that they claimed had suffered a nuisance. Some were partners or relatives - or even lodgers - of the people with the proprietary interest in the land.
The Court of Appeal had held that it was sufficient for a claimant to have a 'substantial interest' in land (a broader definition). But the House of Lords (Lord Cooke dissenting) held that this was incorrect: private nuisance is a tort committed against land. Therefore, if you have no land, you cannot suffer a tort to your land and you cannot bring a claim in private nuisance.
What's it like today?
The tower at One Canada Square was the tallest building in Britain from 1990 to 2010. However, the reason it had interfered with local people's television reception was not thought to be its height so much as its shiny stainless steel cladding. Today, the tallest building in Britain is the (equally shiny) Shard.
In 1989 the residents had been receiving their television signal via a transmitter at Crystal Palace. In April 1991, the BBC installed a transmitter at Poplar. This corrected the problem with the local reception. Today, the analogue transmitters have been switched off and Londoners receive a digital signal.
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