Graham, Tom and Ian

Your Lib Dem team for Cheadle West & Gatley Learn more

How to find out which land is council and which is private

by Lib Dem team on 21 April, 2015

A resident raised the issue of a large pothole in front of the parade of shops on Stonepail Road and my first thought was “is this Council land or private?”.

If the council’s responsible we can get it sorted fairly easily. If it’s private then it’s a different matter. Landowners have responsibility for their own land and the Council has barely enough money to maintain it’s own roads and pavements without doing other people’s too. (There are some limited cases where the Council can act, normally on unadopted roads where there’s a real danger).

So what if you want to know the status of a road, pavement or even a field? Easy – it’s all a few mouse clicks away.

Go to the Council website and, under the Find It section, put in the road name or postcode (anything nearby is fine).

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On the next page click on a specific address (it probably doesn’t matter which address for the mapping – if you wanted to bring up your recycling collection dates it could make a difference).

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Click on “My maps” at the top right. That brings up the mapping tool. On the left hand side you’ve now got lots of options to choose from.

  • Tick “Land ownership” which will show you land owned by the Council and land the council leases out.
  • Under “Transport & streets – Highways and street maintenance” tick “Adopted highways” – roads and pavements maintained by the council.

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In this case we can see that the adopted highway doesn’t include the land in front of the Stonepail Road premises – that will be privately owned. It’s probably owned by the same person who owns the building, but an online Land Registry search costing £3 will confirm within a couple of minutes.

Looking at the pothole, we can see that it looks to be on the private land. There’s a clear line dividing the pavement from the frontages (not always the case as in some places – like Church Road, Gatley and Cheadle High Street – the Council’s worked with traders to get consistent paving right up to the shops).

stonepail pothole

So in this case it looks to me like the pothole is on private land and needs to be tackled in that way. If someone were to injure themselves or their property, the landowner could be liable.

   1 Comment

One Response

  1. David Maycock says:

    Its another case of cars on the pavement you can tell that by the damage.

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