Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions & Anor v Skerritts of Nottingham Ltd [2000] EWCA Civ 60

Skerritts is a leading Court of Appeal authority on the curtilage of a listed building. It confirms that curtilage is a question of fact and degree and, importantly, that the idea of curtilage always having to be small is too rigid to be useful as a universal legal test.

This is the 25th February 2000 listed-building curtilage judgment. It should not be confused with the separate Skerritts marquee case from 22nd March 2000, which concerns whether a substantial temporary structure is a building.

Neutral citation

[2000] EWCA Civ 60; [2001] QB 59

Court

Court of Appeal (Civil Division)

Judgment date

25th February 2000

Judge

Lord Justice Henry, Lord Justice Robert Walker and Mr Justice Alliott

Case number

QBCOF/99/0369/C & QBCOF/99/0690/C

What Skerritts decided

The case concerned Grimsdyke Hotel in Harrow Weald, originally a substantial Victorian country house designed by Norman Shaw. The main house was Grade II* listed.

A stable block stood about 200 metres to the east. It was probably built at about the same time as Grimsdyke and was almost certainly also designed by Norman Shaw, but it was not separately listed.

Harrow served a listed building enforcement notice after plastic double-glazed windows were installed in the stable block. The issue was whether the stable block fell within the curtilage of the listed house and was therefore treated as part of the listed building.

The Court of Appeal held that the Inspector had been entitled to find that it did.

Dyer did not create a universal smallness test

The High Court had quashed the Inspector’s decision because the Inspector had not expressly considered the idea, derived from Dyer v Dorset, that a curtilage must be small.

The Court of Appeal held that this put too much weight on Dyer.

Dyer was correctly decided on its own facts. A house on the edge of a 100-acre college estate, hundreds of yards from the principal buildings, was not within their curtilage. But the observations suggesting that curtilage must always be small went further than was necessary to reach that decision.

Small is completely relative

Lord Justice Robert Walker explained that the curtilage of a substantial country house can plainly be larger than the curtilage of an ordinary suburban house.

Historic stables, lodges and other satellite buildings may lie within the curtilage of a mansion even though they stand some distance away.

The court considered the concept of smallness so relative in this context that it was almost meaningless and unhelpful as a separate criterion.

This does not mean distance is irrelevant. Physical layout remains an important part of the factual assessment. The point is that there is no universal acreage or distance beyond which curtilage becomes impossible.

Physical layout, ownership and function remain important

The Inspector had followed the familiar factors from Sutcliffe v Calderdale:

• physical layout and the relationship between the buildings
• ownership, past and present
• use or function, past and present

The stable block had an obvious historical and functional relationship with the country house and had formed part of the same estate.

Those were legitimate matters for the Inspector to weigh.

The principal-and-accessory relationship also matters

Skerritts reviewed the House of Lords decision in Debenhams v Westminster City Council. That case had emphasised the idea of a principal building and an ancillary or accessory structure.

A separate structure is more readily capable of being within a listed building’s curtilage where its historic role is genuinely ancillary to the principal building, such as the stable block of a mansion house.

A shared ownership boundary or broad operational connection alone is not enough.

Curtilage is still a question of fact and degree

The Court of Appeal doubted whether curtilage could usefully be described as a strict legal term of art. The case itself demonstrated that even lawyers cannot define an exact boundary through words alone.

The decision-maker has to assess the particular relationship on the ground. Courts can correct a legal misdirection but should not replace that planning and factual judgment with their own preferred boundary.

Blackbushe later brought the authorities together

The modern Court of Appeal review in Blackbushe Airport is especially helpful when applying Skerritts today.

Blackbushe confirms that curtilage requires an intimate part-and-parcel association with the building. A shared function or a single wider operational planning unit is not a substitute for that relationship.

Skerritts therefore prevents an artificially narrow size rule, while Blackbushe prevents the concept becoming so broad that it swallows an entire operational site.

Read the full Skerritts curtilage judgment

The Court of Appeal transcript is held in the Planning Geek case law library. Gold Members can open the protected PDF below.

Related Planning Geek guidance

See our practical guide to curtilage and the Planning Geek guide to listed buildings. The separate Skerritts marquee judgment deals with a different planning question.

Skerritts Curtilage Case Law Page Updated: 9th September 2026