Town and Village Greens
Apart from the general use of the term, Village Green has a specific legal meaning in England and Wales, and also includes the less common term Town Greens. Town and village greens were defined in the Commons Registration Act 1965, as amended by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, as land:
- which has been allotted by or under any Act for the exercise or recreation of the inhabitants of any locality
- or on which the inhabitants of any locality have a customary right to indulge in lawful sports and pastimes
- or if it is land on which for not less than twenty years a significant number of the inhabitants of any locality, or of any neighbourhood within a locality, have indulged in lawful sports and pastimes as of right.
These Acts have now been repealed and replaced by the Commons Act 2006, but the fundamental test of whether land is a town and village green remains the same. Thus land can become a village green if it has been used for 20 years without force, secrecy or request (nec vi, nec clam, nec precario). Village green legislation is often used to try to frustrate development. Recent case law (Oxfordshire County Council vs Oxford City Council and Robinson) makes it clear that registration as a green would render any development which prevented continuing use of the green as a criminal activity under the 1857 Inclosure Act and/or the 1867 Commons Act. This leads to some most curious areas being claimed as village greens, sometimes with success. Recent examples include a bandstand, two lakes and (ultimately unsuccessfully) a beach.
The Open Spaces Society states that in 2005 there were about 3650 registered greens in England covering 8,150 acres (3,298 ha) and about 220 in Wales covering about 620 acres (251 ha).
Read more about this topic: Village Green
Famous quotes containing the words town, village and/or greens:
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)