Conveyancing Solicitors in Bradford investigate old covenants

Conveyancing Solicitors in Bradford regularly come across older homes which are subject to numerous restrictive covenants.

These may be set out in full in the title register, or the register will refer to the original document containing them, and a copy can be obtained if required. Sometimes the copies will be of the original nineteenth-century hand-written deeds, which the Property Lawyer must then decipher!

Covenants were often included in Conveyances when land was sold for development in the 1800s, and generally they restrict buyers from using land for a variety of purposes. Victorian Conveyancing Solicitors in Bradford charged by the length of the deeds which they prepared, so they set out these banned uses at great length.

Although such restrictions are rarely of any great importance nowadays, Conveyancing Solicitors in Bradford still need to check in case there is anything which might be significant for buyers.

A typical example of these covenants were those which affected a home on Ramsey Street, Bradford, BD5. Bradford Conveyancer Sukhi Hayre was handling the sale of this property in 2010.

'Noisy noxious offensive or unwholesome trades' prohibited 

The Bradford Conveyancing Solicitor downloaded a copy of the title register from the land registry. This contained a note that the building was subject to covenants, which had been contained in a deed dating from 1897, including the following:

1. Not to build on the strips of land coloured brown on the plan attached to the Conveyance but to leave these open as part of Ramsey Street and the lane at the back of the new houses
2. To contribute to the costs incurred by the vendor in making up the roads and sewers, and to contribute to the maintenance costs of these until they were adopted
3. To use property only as private dwellinghouse, and in particular not to use it for any of the following purposes: stables, pig stye, fowl house, for the sale of fried fish and chipped potatoes, soap boiler, tallow chandler, slaughterhouse, iron works, gas works, tanner, skinner, dyer or any other noisy noxious offensive or unwholesome trade or business
4. To observe the building line marked on the plan and not to allow any part of any new house to project over that line

Modern planning legislation would prevent all the nasty trades mentioned, but the fact that these had to be specifically prohibited does perhaps give some idea of the trades that might be carried on in a Victorian town 'cheek-by-jowl' with people's homes.

Clearly there was nothing there to worry the buyers, as the house being sold was a private house and the road and drains had long since been adopted.

The buyers' Conveyancing Solicitors in Bradford were Patel & Bhatoa of National House, 951 Leeds Road, Bradford, BD3 8JB. Once they had received the result of their local search with Bradford Council they were happy to exchange contracts and complete the sale.