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When we redesigned the front car park at the garden where I used to work the local authority insisted that we planted right to the road edge to prevent drivers parking on the verge. They then charged us an annual fee for 'rent' of this land strip even though I had to maintain it. The highways officer suggested I might like to cut the roadside hedge opposite our property as well as they were short of skilled staff.
If you plant/maintain the councils ground no matter how small that piece of ground is, surely you're liable if someone injurers them selves on it by tripping on it etc......as you have done work that's not been authorised? It seems a bit dodgy to leave yourselves open to that sort of liability
guy i used to know moved into a new estate and adopted a verge like this, eventually he fenced it in and i believe that his idea was that if he looked after it for 10 years, he could claim it as his.... which he did.
can't say i'm in favour of what these people did, but purely from a practical point of view - if everyone did it, then how would you maintain these areas? you can be fairly sure that most of the areas would soon become neglected. better to either do it officially (parish council etc) or leave it alone.
Reminds me of when I worked for the council and we were looking after all the housing estates. Loads of residents would take over a bit of adjacent grassland and convert it into their own little bit of garden.... who can blame them? Problems always occurred when they moved or lost interest..... the area would then become an overgrown jungle. In the end, we'd have to go round all the estates, at considerable expense, putting the areas back to grass again as it was just too impractical to keep them as they were..
Stuart Land-Scape.co.uk said:
exactly. it'd be nice to say yeah go for it, but once the shine wears off.....
Geoff Norfolk said:
It sounds like northants highways through and through.. and i can see where both parties are coming from.. I don't blame people for wanting to plant up re landscape what is effectively no mans land.. However as i am aware the majority of the time it is left there for a reason.. for example service strips etc. Its all very well if they maintain it.. but then there is always going to be the possibility that sooner or later the council will come along and need to open up the ground in that exact place.
Three Rivers council in Herts used to allow you to plant a tree outside your house, so long as you maintained it.
Of course very few people chose suitable trees, or watered them, so many soon looked awful. It also added time to the mowing of the verges, which is a direct cost to the rate payers. And the strimmers killed more trees as well.
Often, what seems a sensible idea to improve a community ends up making it worse!
there in the right people try it all the time to gain a bit of free land but at the end of the day the council own the piece of land and pay to maintain it or in a roundabout way we own that bit of land and pay for its upkeep with our council tax. if people want to gain these bits of land they should seek to buy the bits of land