Category: Uncategorized

November at Stoke Lodge:

5 November 2025: Cotham School makes a planning application to install eight, six-metre tall towers, each with three CCTV cameras, around its leased area at Stoke Lodge (in addition to the six CCTV cameras already in place and the three additional CCTV compounds that are currently on the land without planning permission). This will require digging about 1,000 metres of underground cabling to get power to the places on the field where they want to have cameras. Expensive? Oh yes. Intrusive? Oh yes.

The application was made directly to the Planning Inspectorate (PINS). When Cotham School previously applied for just one CCTV pole, the application was turned down by BCC officers. Is Cotham hoping to persuade PINS that eight is fine when BCC said one was not acceptable? Who knows.

14 November 2025: Cotham School publishes a press statement entitled ‘School Playing Field Targeted in Destructive Vandalism Attack‘. This statement claims that a ‘significant act of vandalism’ has occurred, ‘concentrated in the vicinity of the Cheyne Road footpath access points’, that there is ‘extensive damage’ ‘with large sections deliberately destroyed in a manner that prevents repair or reuse’. Jo Butler, Headteacher of Cotham School, claimed “The damage will cost thousands of pounds to repair”.

Our community does not condone vandalism but neither do we condone inflammatory and misleading claims, which only serve to increase division between the school and the community. There is one (1) damaged and missing panel at the Cheyne Road end of the field. For the sake of accuracy, these panels cost about £40, not ‘thousands of pounds’. There is one (1) damaged and missing panel at the top end of the field (but that wasn’t what the school’s statement was about).

For completeness, one of the ‘spurs of spite’ – the extra bits of fencing that Cotham has installed outside the playing field area to block community use even of the narrow perimeter walkways that previously existed, has been dismantled, though others remain. This spur of fencing out to Ebenezer Lane blocked a wildlife corridor in the vicinity of a known badger sett. The contractors told us they didn’t know why they had been asked to install it in the first place, and we assume it was taken down in response to complaints and ecological advice. That’s also outside the playing field area and not what the school’s statement was about as it wouldn’t affect school use anyway.

As you can imagine, the community is aggrieved that Cotham School is yet again making false claims and trying to portray our much-loved and very safe local green space as a crime hotspot. The community is also a little sceptical about the timing of all this, in a period when the school is trying to build a case for installing 24/7 surveillance of the field. And as always, we object to misinformation from Cotham School.

So we published our own press statement setting out the true facts, and even including a photo of the damaged panel near Cheyne Road. Here it is (taken on 15 November).

We prefer to assume the best of people, so were startled to see that Cotham’s Chair of Governors, Sandra Fryer, had opened an Instagram account to double down on the school’s claims. Here’s her post – she specifically says there are around 15 gaps in the playing field fence in addition to this one (same gap as above, different angle).

Reader, there are not 15 or 16 gaps in the fence. Come and see for yourselves. Cotham’s claims are wildly exaggerated – and despite being made aware of that, the school has not withdrawn them or apologised for misleading the press and the public. Apparently it provided a ‘dossier’ of photos to a local journalist, but many of the photos were of individual screws and fixings, not fence panels.

So why do this at all, and why now? Jo Butler said “The deliberate destruction of our property is unacceptable and morally reprehensible” and we agree. But so are false claims about the extent of it. We will be very interested to see whether similar claims, or links to media coverage of the school’s press statement, turn up in any representations supporting the school’s planning application.

Not for nothing, but the Nolan principles of public life are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership. We love to see it… when we do.

These were words spoken by Sandra Fryer, Cotham School’s Chair of Governors, at a Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting yesterday (23 October). She was talking about the four public rights of way (PROWs) across Stoke Lodge – footpaths that the same Committee decided there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ for in November 2024.

The debate at yesterday’s meeting was about whether or not the Council will ‘enforce’ the PROWs in the interim period before they are confirmed by the Planning Inspectorate and added to the Definitive Map. BCC executives had apparently assured Cotham School, prior to them putting the fence back up right around the playing fields, that they wouldn’t enforce them – meaning that the school could put gates across each entry/exit point. However, those BCC execs had failed to read the Council’s constitution and realise that this is not a matter for the Executive, it’s a matter for the PROWG Committee. Under section 130 of the Highways Act, the Council has a duty to ‘assert and protect the rights of the public to the use and enjoyment of’ public rights of way and to prevent the obstruction of them. So, the Committee was being asked to exercise that duty.

Why does this matter? Well, it’s about ensuring public access, obviously, but also because it’s a criminal offence to wilfully obstruct a public right of way. Cotham School showed up at the meeting to argue that it should be allowed to do exactly that. So long as they know BCC won’t take action to keep the gates open, they are more than happy to obstruct the PROWs. The moral philosophers among you may want to ponder that.

And in this context Sandra Fryer said that the PROWs “do not exist in our mind”. Happily for the rest of us, facts don’t depend on what is in her/Cotham School’s mind. And she was quite firmly reminded by members of the Committee that they don’t agree with Cotham School, that the PROWs do exist, that the Council will support the PROWs when we get to the Planning Inspectorate, and that many of the points she made in her statement were plain wrong. Village green law is different from public rights of way, and these rights were gained many years ago. Once a highway, always a highway.

Later in the day, correspondence between Cotham School and BCC execs was disclosed in response to an FOI request. We’ll dig into this in more detail another time, but it includes the following from Cotham School:

So apparently the PROWs do exist in Ms Fryer’s mind. So much so that yet again Cotham School is threatening legal action about them! The school has made a number of misleading statements about the High Court case this week, but let’s just be clear – the judgment says that the school’s rights under the lease are subject to any public rights of way across the field. Many schools have footpaths like this, even on their main site. In Cotham’s case the footpaths are on a site 3 miles away that they use for a maximum of 8 hours a week!

As for the cavalier assumption that ‘we can vary the routes’ – well, once the PROWs have been confirmed Cotham can try, but again it’s not up to them. The school cannot take for granted that it can extinguish or even divert these long-trodden paths – many schools have tried and failed to do that in other places. Because it’s not about safeguarding. If it was, the school wouldn’t have built a fence right round the field so that the footpaths are inside it.

Ms Fryer voiced years ago to a member of our community that she thought eventually we would get fed up and stop fighting. Newsflash – we won’t. In the face of continuous hostile behaviour from Cotham School, and misinformation in pretty much every statement they publish, we will stand here and defend this land.

When she said “they do not exist in our mind”, a number of us felt that was just as much a reference to our community, to us as human beings. That’s the message we constantly receive from the school’s messaging and conduct.

But we do exist, and we do have rights, and we will walk our paths.

We can now confirm that Cotham School’s application for leave to go to judicial review has been discontinued, with the consent of both the defendant (Bristol City Council) and the interested party (Kathy Welham on behalf of the community). That doesn’t mean it’s all over – Cotham is still continuing with its section 14 application, to ask the court to look afresh at all the evidence supporting TVG registration for Stoke Lodge.

So what’s going on here?

Long-term watchers of our saga will remember that Cotham School filed an application for leave to go to judicial review last September, and then immediately put it on pause so that it could launch its section 14 litigation.

Sidebar: quick explanation of the difference between the two claims:

• A judicial review looks only at whether the decision of the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee was properly reached in June 2023. If Cotham won this claim in court, the decision would go back to the Committee to be reconsidered.
• The section 14 claim, on the other hand, involves the High Court looking at the legal test for TVG status and making the decision for itself about whether the test is met. This is a much more expensive form of litigation than a judicial review, and presents high costs risks for the school.

So Cotham started the JR process and put it on hold (but the judge agreed with our request that the stay should be limited to six months). Then Cotham launched the section 14 proceedings, and a few weeks ago the six month stay for the JR process expired. All the parties had to make submissions about what should happen next.

So what happened?

We argued that it was highly unlikely that the government would decide that reforming TVG legislation was a top priority for it and, more importantly, that it was nonsense for the school to suggest that if section 14 was repealed, that would be done without any transitional provision for ongoing claims. We’ve been saying this from the start, and the court agreed. The section 14 proceedings are under way, and you can’t run multiple forms of litigation about the same thing.

So, the JR is now consigned to history. The next date coming up is a case and costs management conference in the section 14 proceedings, on 13 May, as mentioned in press reports of last week’s Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting here and here.

A lot of things have gone wrong with the way these applications have been handled, but the Committee has the power to put things right tomorrow.

The role of an Inspector in these cases is not to determine whether land should be registered – Parliament has given that role to the Council as registration authority, and BCC has delegated this decision to the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee.

The Inspector’s role is to ensure a fair procedure, particularly where the Council is also the landowner, and where there are factual disputes about important issues. The Committee’s agreed procedure says that this can be done on the paperwork in ‘straight-forward cases where there is no significant conflict of evidence, or no significant objection’. This is clearly not that, and yet the Inspector failed to follow the agreed procedure and hold a non-statutory public inquiry, only admitting right at the end that it was a complicated case and not straight-forward at all.

If he had held a public inquiry, he could not have missed out all the witness statements, or misunderstood the Applicants’ case on key issues. There would have been much less chance of him failing to consider relevant evidence or properly address the Applicants’ arguments. So there has been clear detriment to the Applicants from this breach of proper process.

As the Inspector expressly acknowledges in his final Note, the Committee is not bound by his factual findings or ultimate recommendation; it is entitled to take a different view provided it acts lawfully and gives reasons for its decision. He says it is necessary for the Committee to consider the facts on the two key issues, and also that it is for the Applicants to show the Committee that the legal test is met on the facts – so he clearly recognises that it is open to the Committee to decide that the legal test is met and to register the land.

The Committee’s role is quasi-judicial – it cannot simply rubber-stamp the report of an Inspector who has failed to deal with the evidence properly and hasn’t followed the Committee’s agreed procedure. Parliament could have provided for TVG applications to be determined by a legally qualified judge but it did not – it gave this task to democratically elected local Councillors who bring their local knowledge, common sense and expertise to the table when considering the facts.