Hi all
Hoping someone might have an idea about how to get to the bottom of this problem...
We recently bought a property at auction that will require planning permission for change of use (it is a former chapel) to convert it into a house. The property is currently 'land locked' apart from a foot path and we're hoping to get access for a drive onto the road.
Thing is, there is a small strip of land about 6 foot wide that runs along the front of the property that isn't ours and we can't figure out who it belongs to! We've tried land registry, parish, local and county councils (including the highways division) and everything draws a blank.
The land is regularly mown (by the parish council), has a bus stop, bench and a couple of BT Open Reach boxes on it so it so it definitely looks like 'community' land (rather than privately owned). We could be wrong about this (it's feasible it's a ransom strip) but the lack of land registry info/local knowledge (it's in the kind of village in which people know a lot about each other!) is baffling. I'm beginning to think the land doesn't actually belong to anyone...
Anyway - does anyone have any advice about how to proceed? Are there any avenues we haven't explored? What if the land doesn't actually have an owner?! How would we then prove that and 'claim' the bit we need for our driveway?
Obviously our local council won't let us put in the application without permission from the land owner (assuming, of course, there is one). Aside from applying for planning without the access (which we don't really want to do at the moment), or just going ahead and making a 'site' access anyway (as a few people have advised!) we're stuck.
Thanks for any help/advice you can offer.