By Le Figaro with AFP
Posted 48 minutes ago, updated 34 minutes ago
Tate Modern’s observatory allowed museumgoers to peer into the homes of the handful of residents who were suing the institution. Alex Yeung /stock.adobe.com
After being dismissed twice by courts, the owners of dwellings visible from the museum’s lookout tower eventually won their case.
Owners of glass-enclosed apartments, whose interiors are widely visible from a viewing platform at Tate Modern, London’s iconic tourist attraction, won their privacy invasion lawsuit against the museum on Wednesday. The UK Supreme Court ruled in favor of these owners of five apartments in a luxury real estate residence just meters from the Museum of Modern Art.
Opened in 2016 and visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, the Tate Modern’s 10th-floor open-air gallery offers expansive views of London, including an expansive view of the plaintiffs’ fully glazed quarters. The platform puts them “under constant surveillance (by visitors) for a good portion of the day, every day of the week,” judge George Legatt estimated when announcing the court’s decision. “It is not difficult to imagine how depressing it must be for any normal person to live under such circumstances,” he added, comparing the plaintiffs’ situation to animals “that are exhibited in a zoo.”
An Unusual “Disturbance”
The Tate gallery is a “nuisance” to these people, who are regularly photographed by visitors, with some photos posted on social media, he stressed. This nuisance “goes far beyond anything that can be considered necessary or a natural consequence of the ordinary and common use” of a museum like Tate Modern, the judge argued.
The complainants had twice been dismissed by the courts prior to this complaint to the Supreme Court, which will therefore allow a re-examination of their complaint to decide on measures to remedy this harassment. For example, they propose banning access to part of the gallery or installing a device to block the view of their homes. When asked by AFP, Tate Modern declined to comment on an ongoing case.
The gallery is currently closed, as are other rooms in the museum that have not yet reopened with the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2019, a 17-year-old British teenager with a psychiatric disorder threw a six-year-old French boy off this museum’s tenth-floor observation deck. He’d pushed him over the railing and the child had fallen back onto a fifth-story roof, about a hundred feet below, leaving him badly disabled. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder in 2020.
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