Layout of the Building in UK Law

In my judgment, for one corporeal hereditament to fall within the curtilage of another, the former must be so intimately associated with the latter as to lead to the conclusion that the former in truth forms part and parcel of the latter.

Of the authorities cited to me, I derive most assistance from the decision of the Court of Appeal in Dyer v Dorset County Council, and in particular the judgment of Nourse LJ in the passage already referred to at page 358F-G. The expression "curtilage" is a question of fact and degree. It connotes a building or piece of land attached to a dwelling house and forming one enclosure with it.

Anything which, in the ordinary use of words, would be regarded as a part of the structure, or of the exterior, of the particular "dwelling-house", regarded as a separate part of the building, would be within the scope of paragraph (a).

Item 2 introduces the concept of an "approved alteration of a protected building". It is possible to found an important part of reasoning in favour of the Commissioners on the fact that the alteration in this case was in a practical sense to the outbuilding, not to the House (see para 20 above).

We doubt very much whether it is right to construe the words of the section by reference to Regulations made under powers therein contained, especially when such Regulations are directed solely to procedural matters such as conferring rights of appeal in certain limited circumstances from an order of the local authority.

"Curtilage" seems always to involve some small and necessary extension to that to which the word is attached. In Paul Popper the court was concerned with the curtilage of a factory and it is not surprising that it was held to comprise the grounds of the factory. In Jepson v. Gribble it was, in effect, the "curtilage of the asylum".