Would you buy a place with a public footpath at the bottom of the garden?

[Thiscouldbe]

A house I have lusted after for years has just come on the market and, having looked at it online, it not only looks amazing from the outside but ticks all of our boxes. The downside is the reason I have lusted after it - there is a footpath at the bottom of the garden which makes the house very visible. This footpath runs along the end of the garden of at least 20 - 30 properties. This one has a waist high metal fence between the garden and the path. Others houses have hedges and others have fences. The house itself is raised slightly so, even with a hedge or a fence, you’d still be able to enjoy the view
The area with the footpath at the bottom of it is the only garden so it’s not as if there’s another area where you could be outside and not be on public display. It’s also the side of the house where all of the main rooms are.
My parents do have a public footpath running through their property. But they live in the middle of nowhere so there is very traffic. It also only cuts across a corner of the property and, due to the size of the garden and some strategic planting, they can’t really see into the garden. The most annoying thing is out of control dogs and extraordinarily entitled people who just come into the garden out of nosiness. The set up of the prospective house would be very different with it being used fairly constantly. Whenever I run along it, I’m always passing people whether it’s morning, noon or night, week day or weekend. It is a narrow path so, whilst two people can walk abreast or one person pass another, that’s about it. You couldn’t have people stopping there I wouldn’t have thought.

No, I wouldn't buy a house in this situation, all the people about would annoy me too much!

No.

Are the fences of the other houses waist height, or taller? I'd only buy it if I could put up a 6 foot fence to enjoy the garden without being visible to people using the path.

I don't think it would bother me.I'd spend all my time people watching. 😂

No unless you can completely isolate the area of land and make the garden private in some way. I'm a dog owner and was disgusted by the amount of dog shit I saw on the footpaths around us today.

Being "on view" seems one of the milder things you need to worry about with public footpaths. They attract trouble: antisocial behaviour, people trying to access your property. The land might even actually belong to the house, in which case you'll have to pay out to maintain it, even if your neighbours or other locals use it for quad-biking or fly tipping. I wouldn't buy a house with a right of way/ public footpath.

For me the physical bareer is the more important one - I would hate out of control dogs coming in. Majority of the gardens aren't 100% sound and sight private, there will often be at least the neigbour's upstairs, so this doesn't sound out of the norm

-Is the footpath lit at night?
-I'd be worried about anti social behaviour and would instal cameras inside the back fence to check no one climbs over
-How far from the house is the footpath?
-Check if you could put in a higher fence- even if its only on this side of the metal one. Waist height seems ridiculous!
-Consider pleached trees. Expensive, but would provide instant, additional height/coverage after adding a higher fence.

We recently planted pleached trees where we are now for privacy from the neighbours extension and I love them!
I have always been curious about this house and the fact that it (and a few others) have waist high fences and, in this case, a fairly open fence as everyone (including me) can stop and gawp
or, as you say, dogs can run in. The family currently living there don’t seem phased by it - they’re often sat around outside or playing badminton or swing ball or whatever. Other houses, though, do have full height normal garden fencing and a couple certainly have laurel inside the fence which is higher than the fence. The garden is an OK size so putting a fence up wouldn’t cause an issue with shade or anything. And, as I said, nor can I see it blocking the view. The master bedroom has a balcony which looks out over the garden and footpath but I don’t think that that would bother me as I feel I’d be able to see more of the people on the footpath than they can of me.
Plenty of people along this stretch have a gate from their garden out onto the path and some have CCTV or a ring camera.
Writing all of this has shown me how much attention people can pay to other people’s houses. In my defence, it was a walk the DC actually tolerated when little and it’s a regular running route of mine and I run v slowly so have plenty of time to examine every grain of wood in a fence panel, let alone a whole style of fencing!

I am guessing that the footpath could be the reason why the house is within our budget. I wouldn’t have expected it to be

We lived for many years in a city, the house had ‘private’ lane running along the side of the garden with Victorian houses running along the other side. We never had any problems.
I’d go for it and pot a large prickly hedge behind a fence.
In our current large village there is a house for sale exactly as you described! Is there a school playing field on the other side of the footpath?

I'm confused how dogs can run through a waist height metal fence??? Do you mean they ca jump over the fence to get into the garden?

It wouldn’t bother me. As you say, you can put a fence up as the other properties have. I can’t see there’d be any issues once this has been done.

Not enough information to say. A public right of way could be used by kids on their way to/from school, the occasional dog walker, as a short cut from the town centre car park to the station, loads are used by one person a year. For what it's worth I've got a road at the end of my garden, trucks, buses and cars I just try to remember to wear something if I'm stood by an upstairs window.

I’d have a better boundary than a waist high fence. So 7ft high fence and then plant trees by the fence. That will stop anyone from the path seeing into the garden.

if the house is at a higher level then maybe they could still see it? But unlikely if the path is narrow and they are right next a 7ft high fence with foliage above that. Even if they could people,won’t be stopping and staring in. My house is 5ft from a busy pavement. People don’t stand and look in my windows. So I don’t see how a path at the back is different from a pavement at the front for being inside the house. The garden aspect can be sorted by fence, etc. so yeah I’d buy it.

I'd buy it, put up a fence and plant some tactically places shrubs/trees.

No I wouldn't because I have friends who did this very thing and what we learnt was there are way more weirdos and arseholes than you would ever, ever imagine! Good grief, the stories they told me. It's easy to forget, ticking along in our nice little lives, that there are actually a great deal of pathetic, miserable or downright mad people out there who actively want to cause bother to others. Sad but true. Don't leave yourselves vulnerable to them because they are roaming about searching for people to inflict themselves upon.

I still think it's great we have the amount of public footpaths we do though, it's a wonderful thing in England. I use them less often these days though, mostly because of the chronic dog poo problem Britain is facing, most off-putting.

I would buy it - especially if it was my dream house in every other way. I'd either build a higher fence or put a hedgerow in, but I can honestly say this wouldn't bother me at all, unless it was in an area where anti-social behaviour was rampant.

I wouldn't, I grew up in a house that had a lane running behind the back garden and even with a high hedge and gate it never felt private. My parents even had to padlock the gate at night to stop CF's taking shortcuts through the garden to the estate on the other side. Some men would even take a pee in the entry way even though they were only minutes from home !

I would install a fence as high as the law allows plus foliage on the inside or some nasty prickly plants like Pyracantha (Firethorn). Gardeners often refer to it as natural barbed wire as the dense thorns can be very nasty if you fall into it. I have it on the outside of my garden wall and you would not want to wade through that.

I have a tall iron gate between my front and back gardens which I keep padlocked. It only gets opened when my gardener comes. One day the front gate was open and two workmen strolled up the path hoping to take a short cut through to the back. You should have heard the swearing when they found they could not get through and had to walk along the public path. I had a great laugh watching them on my cameras. The entitlement of some people is amazing. Ive also had people reach up towards the camera over the side door when Ive been watching. They jump a mile when I ask them "Can I help you sonny?" Hours of amusement.

I wouldn’t buy it, big drawback should you want to sell. Privacy in the garden, not being overlooked was a complete non negotiable when we moved the amount of times we looked at properties that were lovely but the moment we went into the garden, I would be no, I can’t live here.

Most people live in a house/flat with a public footpath running close to it, it's called a pavement, they somehow manage to survive the stress of the public passing nearby.

Yes, I would. You can always change the fence and trees. Access to the path is a bonus for you. Install safety features.

Sometimes a house only becomes affordable to you because of a compromise.
My present house has an overlooked from pavement principal bedroom. We were willing to put up with this flaw as the views from our upper floor across the sea are amazing.
We all have non negotiables. You have to decide what yours are.
Assuming my solicitor said it was OK I would be interested.