Hi, I’m after a little advice regarding some leylandii trees at the bottom of my garden.
We live on a hill and all the houses are at 90° to the hill so we all have flat gardens with a rise of about 4’ to our right.
We live at the top of the hill at the end of the cul-de-sac and there are three garages at the end of our garden to the right hand side with a turning bay in between them and my garden wall. This wall is waist height their side and around 9/10’ height my side.
There are 4/5 leylandii there which are never looked after by the owner who owns 2/3 houses up and around the back (a bit of an odd layout). His brother is one of his tenants and over the past few years my Mother in law has spoken to the owner or his brother to inform him that the trees need sorting.
I spoke to the brother around a month ago and explained that the trees appear to have damaged my garden wall and asked him to get his landlord (brother) to contact me.
His other tenant has been unable to open her car boot due to the trees being so overgrown and had complained to him about it but he refused to act.
I found this out yesterday evening as I went and found the house which backs onto my garden as their garden is wider than ours and is also backed onto by the trees. He explained that he had been trying to get the trees sorted for some time as he can see the wall clearly. The main reason I wanted to talk to him was because when I went to look, I was almost hanging into his back garden so I wanted to let him know why I was there and what I was doing.
One of the trees has a branch which has poked out into his garden and hooked onto the back corner of my garden wall. It has then grown outwards and is tearing the wall backwards. I only realised the damage when we replaced our fence panels at the end of May and I can see a huge 2-3” crack on the inside of our wall and we have some horizontal cracks spreading forwards along the breeze blocks towards the front of the shed- I think due to a cantilever effect of the wall being ripped backwards.
On the outside of our wall towards the back, the crack is also huge and a good 2-3”.
Any advice for how to word a letter to him that will make him actually take action and repair our wall before it falls down and flattens our shed potentially bringing half the hill with it?
If he ignores us or refuses to do anything, what do we do then?
I have managed to find his address from an old planning application to build a flat above the three garages and the plans for this application actually use our wall as one of the sides for his building (cheeky devil).
I’ll try to attach some pictures.
The neighbour at the back rents from a Housing Assosciation so he is going to get onto them again for some assistance- I’m hoping they have a big powerful legal team to sort this out quickly! (Although I know I won’t be their concern).
I’m really worried about what could happen if the wall goes as it is so high and is at least 1’ thick 😨