Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Haldane Place ·
The Doorway of Three Consents
A planning file kept for one doorway records it granted in one year, refused in the next, and built in the week between, each ledger signing the masonry it did not-order.
- filed: "before the boundary court"
- reference: "HP/DC/52"
1. This file is maintained by the district planning office in respect of a single doorway in the party wall of numbers 4 and 6 Haldane Place, brick on brick, arched, blocked, and now one matter of jurisdiction short of a hearing. It is filed under HP/DC/52, and it is the thinnest file in the district's strong room by page count and the heaviest by pencil, which this paragraph will attempt to make arithmetic of rather than anecdote.
2. The doorway first enters the record on the 3rd of March, 1971, as an application by the owner of number 4 to open a communicating door into number 6, which she had lately bought as a view to the conversion of the two houses into one. The application was granted. The consent slip survives, numbered, stamped, signed by the district surveyor of that year, and filed in its proper sleeve.
3. The doorway next enters the record on the 9th of March, 1972, as a second application by the same owner for the same work at the same wall. It was refused. The refusal slip survives identically: numbered, stamped, signed by the district surveyor of that year, who is the same man, and countersigned by the clerk of the same committee, whose minute book carries both meetings at their proper dates with the same nine members present and voted the other way.
4. The doorway third enters the record in neither year, because the masonry does not wait on papers. The week between the two dates, the 3rd and the 9th of March, 1971 and 1972 both, is the week the work was done. The wall chapter of that span shows bricks carried in through number 4, a hodman engaged and paid from a wage book since burned for its waste paper value, lime mortar mixed on the pavement in a trough rented from the builder's merchant, and the arch turned on the Thursday. Both houses were entered in the rate book that quarter as one dwelling, backdated to the 6th of March, a date that is on the calendar of neither consent.
5. Checks were made. The district surveyor, interviewed in his retirement, signed to both slips as his own and referred all questions of sequence to the minute book, which he described as kept up and kept fair. The committee's minute book was produced, and is fair, and shows no adjournment, no rescission, no second reading of the matter in any year. The wall itself was inspected by the present deputy, who confirms the arch is old, the brick is lime-bedded, the blockage at the far side is of later date, and the workmanship is of one continuous week and not two.
6. The consequence for the jurisdiction is the whole of the difficulty. If the consent of 1971 stands, the doorway is lawful and the refusal of 1972 is addressed to a door that had served its year and could not be refused retroactively. If the refusal of 1972 stands, the doorway is illegal and the consent of 1971 granted a door that had not yet been cut and could not be cut lawfully for another year. The building sits squarely in the week the papers leave out, and the papers sit squarely either side of the wall.
7. The boundary court has been joined on the point by the valuation office, which wants the doorway rated or unrated and cannot have both. The district's position, as filed and as instructed, is that both consents are genuine, both signatures are genuine, no forgery is alleged, and the office is not in a position to prefer one ledger over the other, both being kept in the same hand by the same office in the same year, the year having been found to run twice.
8. The file will travel to the court in this condition, three slips and a week, and the deputy has pencilled at the foot of the sleeve the question the court will inherit unmarked: which of the two ledgers does a doorway obey, the one that granted it before it was built, or the one that refused it after, and if the wall stands under both, under which of them does it fall.