I’m high up at the top of the Colne Valley. Below me, the town of Slaithwaite drops precipitously to the river below. The valley is bathed in light. It’s right at the edge of the county; over the next hill is Greater Manchester, where it’s probably raining.
But I’m not here for the views. I’m here to look at a patch of land. It’s narrow, covered in scrub and really quite steep, probably 30 degrees in places. It was sold at auction a year ago. The land was bought by a solicitor called Andrew Milne, who has offices in the City of London. Since then, life has never been the same for the residents of Meadow Lane.
There’s no way around it; to understand this story, you need a map. Meadow Lane is at the top of the valley, and runs east to west along it. Up above the houses on the north side runs a strip that goes right across the back of everyone’s gardens — the area marked A on the map below. On the other side of this land lies a large field, which is part of the Dartmouth Estate.
Milne bought it at auction from the Duchy of Lancaster, for £24,000. I assumed at first that this must be because the Duchy owns lots of land around the town, but that’s not the case. In fact it seems this was their only holding.
Last week, I got in touch with the Duchy to ask why this unlovely strip of land was in their possession. It turns out it used to belong to the developer that built the estate, Silentway Developments. Silentway went bust in 2021, leaving the land essentially ownerless. It was then “passed to the Duchy via the process of Bona Vacantia”, the press team informs me. Bona Vacantia? This sends me down a rabbit hole — it turns out any unowned land in the “county Palatine of Lancaster” ends up with the crown, via the Duchy.
Hang on, though: this is Yorkshire, not Lancashire. Right, they explain, but the company that collapsed was registered in Manchester. So, it’s ours.
One of the residents of Meadow Lane tried to buy it on behalf of the road, but they were outbid at auction by Milne, who laid down £24,000 for it. Not a bad day’s work for the Duchy, who didn’t have to do anything other than inherit the land when Silentway went under. But it seems a lot for a very thin strip of land — just a few metres across in places — which is unlikely to have much real use.
But here’s what happens next. Milne divides his bit of land up into 29 separate plots, each one aligned with the back gardens of properties on Meadow Lane. So now, according to Milne’s map, things look like this (Milne’s land is highlighted in yellow).
Then, on 20 March 2025, he sends an identical letter to everyone living on that side of the street. The letter begins with the ominous subheading ‘My Land’ and goes on:
“I own the land behind your property and I enclose the Land Registry plan… My Managing Agent has inspected my land and discovered that the fence at the back of your property is in the wrong position and you are trespassing on part of my land.” Milne then said that unless the fence was moved “within 7 days” he would begin the process to obtain a Possession Order and seek damages.
Unsurprisingly, many homeowners were pretty worried about this. In some cases, Milne was right — people had decided to extend their gardens a bit and encroached onto his land. But in many cases they hadn’t. Nonetheless, everyone got the same letter, with the same threat. “It never even crossed my mind that anyone would behave in that manner,” one recipient told me.
Having made this threat, Milne then moved on to the offer. This nastiness could be avoided, he explained, if they simply bought the plot at the back of their house off him. How much? “£8,000 plus my conveyancing solicitors costs of £950 plus VAT and any disbursements.” Given what he had paid at auction worked out at roughly £800 per plot, this was quite a mark up. And there was another, barely veiled threat, in Milne’s letter. “I would point out that any boundary dispute regarding your property must be disclosed by you to any potential buyer and might make your property unsaleable.” In other words, the very existence of a dispute, regardless of whether it was valid or not, might trap them in their houses.
At this point, some people paid up. “I saw it straight away for what it was: a business transaction”, one man, who didn’t want to be named, told me. There was no use getting het up about it. “We just wanted to get him out of our lives and move on.” Others who had gone onto Milne’s land felt they had no choice but to part with the cash.
But many people sat tight, and a couple of months later another letter hit the doormat. This contained good news, bad news, and just very strange news.
The good news was that Milne was now prepared to offer a “special rate” of just £5,000 (plus solicitors’ costs) to sell them the land. (Though this didn’t impress one homeowner, who got a surveyor in to make an estimate of its value, and came up with something just over £1,000.)
The bad news was that if they didn’t take up his offer, then others would. “The plots have been advertised on the internet for sale. You will appreciate that there are tens of thousands of people on the internet who want to invest in plots next to residential properties. I have had enormous interest and I now have offers to buy 10-15 plots.”
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It was when Milne started to talk about whose these offers were from, that it began to get weird. They were “people who want to keep bees and also who want to use the gradient to test rally bikes and even travellers who have expressed interest partly because of trespassing animals from the Dartmouth Estate.” These animals, Milne said, “find my grass irresistible and deserve to be cooked and eaten as compensation.” Residents I spoke to expressed some bafflement at the carnivorous turn the letter took at this point.
We asked Milne whether these offers were ever genuine, particularly given that ten months on none of them appear to have been taken up. Was this just a scare tactic to pressure people?
He didn’t reply, but then this didn’t come as a surprise. Me and my colleagues have actually been writing about Milne for some time now. It started when, last summer, he bought the land underneath hundreds of Sheffield homes. He then sent “very aggressive” letters (in the words of Olivia Blake, the MP for the area) to homeowners, including mockups of high court documents — his name versus theirs — in an attempt to pressure people into buying the land off him, sometimes for over £25,000. “He has just wiped me out”, one homeowner, Denise Jeffcock told us. Before we went to press, Milne told my colleague Mollie that he would “definitely bring proceedings for Defamation and Malicious Falsehood if you publish such complete and malicious lies.” We published anyway, and we haven’t heard from him since.
But back to Milne’s second letter to Slaithwaite homeowners. It wasn’t just that these hypothetical bee keepers, bikers and travellers were going to be tearing around at the back of people’s gardens. They were going to be going through their houses.
“My understanding, from other sites, is that land is never legally landlocked and always has a legal right of way known as an Easement of Necessity to the nearest road by the shortest route”, Milne said — i.e. through their houses, to Meadow Lane. “If I sell to one of the internet buyers, who have made offers, the plot behind your house, they would be entitled to access through your property to get to their plot.” Such a development might cause the property to become “unsaleable or unmortgageable.”
And it would be no use crying to Milne then. “Once I have sold a plot to an internet buyer, I will not entertain any further correspondence about it. It is simply a matter for you to deal with as new neighbours.”
Unsurprisingly, his argument doesn’t hold water. It is correct that land should never be landlocked, but it is the responsibility of the people buying and selling land to ensure that doesn't happen. You cannot create a new right of way through someone else’s property by chopping up your land into parcels and selling them off. We asked Milne if he knew this was false, and if so whether it might amount to fraud, given the clear intention was to persuade people to pay him thousands of pounds for a small bit of scrubby land. He didn’t reply.
Still, Milne wanted homeowners to see the real potential in that bit of land, if only they would use their imagination. “At another site, a buyer from me insisted the land that I was selling… was worthless “waste land”. They then bought the land from me and planted a stunning orchard.”
It’s possible to see the comic side of Milne’s communications, the frankly bizarre asides, the surreal prospect of a motley troupe of beekeepers and rally bikers marching in and out of the properties of Meadow Lane as the residents try to go about their lives. But for the people living here, who have been experiencing Milne’s threats, the reality is much less funny. “It was horrid, absolutely horrid,” one woman told me. “We felt a lot of pressure, which I think is his tactic.” Another used one word to sum up Milne's approach: “bullying”.
Both of them, like almost everyone I speak to, don’t want to go on the record. In fact, two people offer their names, only to get in touch later and retract them again. “People are just really scared to talk,” one tells me. Another man I meet outside his home is very suspicious for some time, seemingly wondering if I’m actually here working for Milne. When I persuade him of my journalist credentials, he tells me that Milne’s legal profession is a big part of what has made it so daunting. “People have been terrified of him. Because he knows what he’s talking about, and we don’t.”
But in recent months, Milne has gone quiet. Those who have held out have stopped hearing from him. That might be because he’s had a lot on his plate, having recently been taken through the courts and sentenced for stalking, something that’s led the solicitors’ regulator to stop him practising unsupervised. Meanwhile Private Eye magazine, the Daily Mail, BBC Look North, and Channel 5 News have all picked up our story about his letters to homeowners in Sheffield.
And just last week, South Yorkshire Police announced they had launched a criminal probe into his actions in the city. The police told affected homeowners that they were investigating whether his communications with them amounted to blackmail and fraud.
Back on Meadow Lane, there’s still a sense of uneasiness about Milne’s ongoing ownership of much of the land, and what that could mean. Even among those who have bought their plot off him, there’s a wariness that he might get back in touch. As more than one said to me, while apologising for not letting me use their name: “he’s still my neighbour.”
