Bristol school can erect controversial structure without permission after thousands spent on legal fees

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of council tax payer money have been spent on external legal fees in the years-long row over whether there should be a fence around Stoke Lodge playing fields. The fields were used by Cotham School but also the local community who live nearby.

Earlier this year a High Court judge ruled that the school should be allowed to put a fence back up. Then campaigners urged the council to issue an “Article Four Direction”, which would mean the school needing to apply for planning permission for a replacement fence.

But councillors on the economy and skills policy committee said this would be too expensive and take too much time, on Monday, September 22. Their decision removes a potential obstacle to Cotham School putting the fence back up, to the disappointment of local campaigners.

Helen Powell, from the We Love Stoke Lodge campaign, said: “It’s a council-owned heritage asset and home to Bristol’s finest collection of notable and veteran trees, but apparently there’s nothing there worth protecting. They plan to fence through the roots of protected trees, to cut off a listed building from its parkland and alienate the local community again.”

The school has permitted development rights to put up a fence. An Article Four Direction would have removed these rights, so the school would need to apply for planning permission. This would have given campaigners an opportunity to oppose the application, and potentially convince councillors on a development control committee to refuse permission.

Sandra Fryer, chair of governors at Cotham School, said: “When the judge found that these are school playing fields and these should be left to Cotham to manage as we see fit and appropriate, I thought we would have an opportunity to move forward. We’ve looked at the things that worked well when the fence was up before and things that didn’t work well.

“We have reached out in a subtle way to the campaigners but so far all we’ve heard is ‘we’ll keep fighting’. Let the school get on with running its business properly. We will put the fence back up. We will do it properly and effectively.”

There is another way the council can protect the public’s access to the playing fields. By designating public rights of way through the fields, that would mean local residents can still walk through them. An application is currently in front of the government, pending a decision on whether to approve these public rights of way. It’s unclear when the decision is due to be made.

Labour Councillor Tom Renhard said: “Campaigners on both sides need to get back in the room together and have a conversation, to try and have a further attempt to mediate a more positive solution that’s going to work for both the school and local residents. The amount of time, resource and impact this is having is not a situation that anyone wants to find ourselves in.

“The council should play a role in perhaps appointing mediators to help facilitate those conversations. That would be a better use of time than us trying to pursue one side or the other and probably incur further legal costs.”

Liberal Democrat Cllr Andrew Brown, chair of the economy committee, added: “Something we’ve not mentioned is the idea of potentially dividing the space in some way so that public access could be retained on one side of the oak tree, and then a more contained solution for the school adjacent to the pavilion.

“There should be attempts at mediation that avoid the courts and making lawyers very wealthy. This has cost the council and the school a great deal of money and the only people benefiting are lawyers at the moment.”

Contractors were photographed on the playing fields, appearing to put up a fence, on Tuesday, September 23. According to the school’s website, the playing fields are “now closed pending work under way to enable the school to get back to using the playing fields in due course”.

Cotham School put a fence up in 2019 to protect its pupils during PE lessons. This was later removed, when the council’s public rights of way and greens committee said the fields had to be kept open for the public.

Then in June a High Court judge said the committee was wrong, and the primary purpose of the fields were for education, which meant the fence could go back up. The We Love Stoke Lodge campaigners are now planning to appeal the High Court decision.