Residents in fight for land (From Oxford Mail)

Residents in fight for land

7:00pm Wednesday 15th February 2012 in News By Damian Fantato

Roger Baycock, right, and Sivanesarajah Pakeerathan at the land they have fenced off

residents who fenced off a grass verge have been told to get off the land by the end of the month.

The people from Marston, Oxford, want to seize ownership of the land outside the old Friar pub to safeguard one of the area’s memorial trees for future generations.

But Oxfordshire County Council came forward and declared it owned the land as it was part of the highway.

Roger Baycock, who runs Allegro Oxford saxophone shop on Marston Road, is one of the group who put up a chain-link barrier around the 15 metre long strip of land.

He said: “We want to protect this land because one of the memorial trees is on it. The council has not been removing debris from the land and I want to know why it has not been maintaining it.”

The land is home to one of the trees planted on Armistice Day, 1950, in memory of the people of Marston who died during the Second World War.

Mr Baycock and other residents had hoped to gain ownership of the triangular section of grass through a process called ‘adverse possession’.

Under the process, if land is fenced off and not claimed then, after a certain period of time, it becomes the property of the people who took control of it. But the county council has revealed the land is classified as highway and so cannot be claimed via this process.

Mr Baycock has been given until Friday, February 24, to remove the fence or the council will do it for him and charge him nearly £200 to do so.

County council spokesman Owen Morton said: “As the highways authority, we have a legal obligation to act when an illegal structure, in this case a fence, has been erected.

“We have asked the residents to remove the fence on several occasions but unfortunately they have not done so. Inevitably this has left us with no choice but to serve official notice.”