Unregistered land - company to find owner?

[Merrow]

I've exhausted the usual searches for trying to work out who owns the alley beside my house. I expect it's the whoever developed our house, as ours is the first in the street of a different style. But our house is over a hundred years old so that's not proved immediately helpful.

I've seen there's a company called first locate which doesn't charge crazy amounts and claims to have 400 members of staff running searches, has anyone used these? Or anywhere else?

It's just an overgrown dead end, but if we could buy it we could squeeze in some off road parking.

I think in the absence of an owner I’d start by occupying the area openly and see if anyone comes forward. You could even try gating it off.

I’d be inclined to do what the previous poster suggested . Start using the land, ideally putting some boundary marker to show that others are excluded from using it - a gate, or planting, or of course just parking your car on it! . If someone comes forward you can offer to buy it. If nobody does, you can eventually apply to the Land Registry for possessory title.
Also check back in the deeds, there might be reference to a much older deed which predates your house showing the extent of the land owned by previous owners before your ‘parcel’ was sold off.

I wouldn't use a company like that, sounds a bit unlikely - 400 people?

Anyway what might happen is, they trace the owner and then act as middlemen (or middlethem these days) and squeeze both parties for a percentage, or buy it and sell it on to you...
(I am, by nature, cynical of these sort of companies)

As others have said, start to use it, if you ENCLOSE it I think you can claim ownership after 7 years (although that may be an urban myth!)

So, adverse possession (basically blocking it off and taking sole usage) takes 12 years and I'd have to show usage for that time. Unfortunately in terms of parking we'd have to knock down part of our front wall to make the space usable.

We moved here about 3 years ago and the old owners don't know who own the bit of land, apparently they looked into a bit with the neighbours who adjoin it on the other side. So while I would be fine finding the owner and buying the land, and that just being a consequence of being bothered enough to go to further lengths, I expect the neighbours would complain if I just decided to use it with the intention of eventually getting it for free. As would I, were they to start using. I suppose we could both just agree to use it, and that would have some benefits to me (if we had half the space we could have somewhere to store our bikes). The real benefit would be a driveway though.

The council used to believe they had adopted it, and so did some maintenance, but then after my recent queries decided they actually hadn't. I think whoever owns it is likely unaware and definitely not local.

I looked into the company a bit more and they're primarily a debt collecting agency, hence tracing ownership. Unsurprisingly the fee jumps massively for unregistered land though! So that's not a route

Before you block it off, check if it's a public right of way. Your local Council should be able to help you.
Do you know if any of your neighbours are entitled to use it?

There is an important legal presumption – ad medium filum (meaning 'up to the middle line' in Latin). This presumption states that the adjacent landowner to a highway route owns the land up to the middle of that route. This means that it is likely that as the blocked up former lane is unadopted that you and the owner in the other side each own to the centre line of the lane.