The issue involves five owners of four floors in the urbanization Neo Bankside -a luxurious and exclusive glass-enclosed skyscraper on the south bank of London-, who took action in 2017 against the Tate for the 500,000 annual visitors who are estimated to “look at their homes” from the tenth-floor viewing platform, located 34 meters away.
With an impressive architecture, the Neo Bankside residential complex, inaugurated in 2012, was four years ahead of the opening date of the Tate platform (inaugurated in 2016), which since then offers an impressive panoramic view of the city, as well as as a direct vision of its floors with glass facades.
According to the ruling released by the English court, the owners of luxury apartments located opposite the Tate Modern gallery face “an unacceptable level of intrusion” that prevents them from “enjoying their homes.” They even compare it to a “zoo”.
Although the ruling of the highest instance of justice found dissent among the judges, all the members of the Supreme Court disagreed with a previous ruling of the Court of Appeal, according to which visual intrusion did not fall within the scope of application of nuisance legislation.
Throughout six years there were numerous intricacies and perspectives from which to “observe” the case. For example, the judges of two courts ruled against the owners for different reasons. One of them said that “they could put up curtains” and another alluded, without being so explicit, to the private rights of a few wealthy property owners against the general public enjoying a panoramic view of London.
As explained to the British newspaper The Guardian Richard Cressall, an expert in real estate litigation, the sentence was “an extremely unexpected result”, but he doubted that there were many cases like this. Perhaps, how many museums in the world have a viewpoint on their 10th floor?
The gallery on the tenth floor, which functions as a viewing platform, is currently closed, like other spaces in the museum that have not yet reopened as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The plaintiffs first proposed that access to a part of the gallery be prohibited or that a device be installed to block the view of their apartments. The final resolution of this case could consist of a court order -to close all or part of that viewpoint- or the payment of compensation to the owners, The Guardian reported.
