New Housing, Old Rules: Can Land Law Keep up?: XXIV Old Buildings Lecture 2025

On 6 March 2026 Professor Susan Bright (University of Oxford) delivered the 2026 XXIV Old Buildings Lecture entitled "New Housing, Old Rules: Can Land Law Keep up?".

In recent years, more than 80% of new housing estates developed by large housebuilders include amenities that are not adopted by the relevant statutory bodies. As a result, roads, public play areas, drainage systems, and other shared facilities are maintained by private management companies, with the costs passed on to homeowners. Yet, as Lord Templeman famously observed in Rhone v Stephens (1994), every student of real property law learns at an early stage that positive covenants affecting freehold land do not run with the land and are enforceable only against the original covenantor. How, then, are successive homeowners made to contribute to these ongoing obligations?

This lecture examines the 'ways and means' employed by conveyancers to ensure that such covenants bind successors in title and evaluates whether these mechanisms achieve satisfactory outcomes, both in terms of legal effectiveness and their broader implications for contemporary notions of homeownership.

Timings:

1. Professor Graham Virgo - Introduction: 00:00
2. Professor Susan Bright: 01:31

The XXIV Old Buildings Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest of the Cambridge Private Law Centre, and the event is sponsored by XXIV Old Buildings.

More information about this lecture is available from the Private Law Centre website:

https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/events