We have a typical London garden, long and thin. Next door to us is a house like ours but it is divided into three flats. The lower ground flat has the first half of the garden that their kitchen opens out onto, the upper ground floor flat has no outside space, and the first floor flat "owns" the back half of the garden although they have no direct access to it. That flat is owned by the freeholder of the entire building and he rents the flat out. We have been here nearly three years and in that time the tenants have used the back half of the garden about 3 times for BBQs and that's it. I presume that since they have to come out their main front door and then walk round the house and down the side passage between our houses to get to their garden, they can't really be bothered that often. The garden gets hugely overgrown in the summer, and the fence is falling apart.
Do you think it would be cheeky for me to ask the freeholder to sell us all or part of the back bit of the garden? Does ayone know how you go about working out the price of something like that (it's about 20ft by 35ft in total)? It would make a huge difference to our kids to have more running around space and I could get all green-fingered and join the veg growing mumsnetters.
Would really appreciate any ideas about this. Sorry for length of post!