Potted history to provide a sense of place
11 May 2025(2025 May) – Currently, I’m acting as expert witness for a head lessee of a block of shops in a village near St Albans. It’s an unusual rent review involving a dispute with the freeholder about the amount of ground rent. Despite a previous review involving different parties, there is no documentation on how the rent was arrived at.
Whenever I write a report, I include a potted history to provide a sense of place – and help keep the memory alive. I found a postcard of the block shortly after it was built, but could only guess what the site had been used for before. My guess was almost right. The local history society has sent me photos of what was there before, including a photo of the man whose building it was. His café had been named after the distance the village is from London.
A few years ago, I was instructed by Chipping Norton Town Council (Oxfordshire) to value the rents for a rifle range and a football ground in its community centre at Greystones. Curious to find out what an old house used as offices and nowadays owned by a private landlord, I found it had been a hunting lodge, the 52 acres gardens. The CN local history society sent me a copy of the auction catalogue from the 1950s, when the property had been sold to the council. I contacted the agents for the owner of the offices and asked them to ask their client to contact me, as I thought that perhaps the owner would like to have the history of the building. He did. So now he knows – which he didn’t before.
If you’ve ever done any work at the Kings Cross London end of Caledonian Road N1, you may have heard the name Stukey as the local developer. Unlike his contemporaries who sold the properties they built, he kept the circa 200 he built: shops, flats and houses. Probably cost next to nothing by modern standards, worth a fortune nowadays. For about 10 years I’ve acted for the tenant of the pizza restaurant at 14/16 – the rent there alone circa £60K. Also, I acted for the tenants at no 10 and 50. The latter (50) the trustees had sold to a developer who wanted to get rid of the tenant and succeeded.
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