Other resident members of the family, including such de facto partners and lodgers as may on the particular facts fairly be considered as having a home in the premises, could therefore be allowed standing to complain of truly serious interference with the domestic amenities lawfully enjoyed by them. By contrast, the policy of the law need not extend to giving a remedy in nuisance to non-resident employees in commercial premises. The employer is responsible for their welfare. On this part of the case I have only to add that normally there should not be any difficulty about sensible compromises with the author of the nuisance. Members of a household impliedly authorise the householder to represent them in such matters.

      As interferences with the amenities of land and personal injuries arising during the use of land are cognate subjects, it may be appropriate to add a few words about personal injuries from private nuisance. Malone v. Laskey appears to assume that these will be actionable at the suit of a qualified plaintiff. A recent writer has concluded after a survey of the field that, although there is not much authority on the point, an occupant of property affected there by a nuisance can probably recover for personal injuries (Martin Davies in (1990) 20 W.A.L.R. 129). In his 1949 article in 65 L.Q.R. 480, Professor Newark partly denied this, but made a major qualification of his thesis by conceding (n.55) that it might well be that where an actionable nuisance is committed which in addition to interfering with the plaintiff's enjoyment of rights in land also damages his person or chattels, he can recover in respect of the damage to his person or chattels as consequential damages. He deplored "an incautious obiter dictum which was let fall in the Common Pleas in 1535" and "sent subsequent generations wrong in their law." Professor Newark was referring to a statement by Fitzherbert J. that a rider injured by falling at night into a trench across the highway would have an action against the maker of the trench. If this was indeed an indiscretion on Fitzherbert's part, to rue it now might seem a little late. In truth it has become solidly established that an action lies for personal injuries from a public nuisance: see for one of many illustrations Mint v. Good [1951] 1 K.B. 517, C.A., and so much was implicitly accepted by this House in Jacobs v. London County Council [1950] A.C. 361, 374-377, where Lord Simonds said that the law of nuisance had travelled far beyond its original limits.

      My Lords, as to the kind of harm actionable it would be hard to see any sensible difference between public and private nuisance. So, too, between nuisance and Rylands v. Fletcher liability, at least since the identification in the Cambridge Water case, [1994] 2 A.C. 264 of reasonable foresight of damage as an essential ingredient of liability under either head. It is true that there is a dictum to the contrary by Lord Macmillan in Read v. J. Lyons & Co. Ltd at p. 173, but the other members of the House in that case left the point open and there are sundry cases in the reports of liability under Rylands v. Fletcher for personal injuries. To the examples given by Lord Porter in Read v. J. Lyons & Co. Ltd at p. 178 may be added another Court of Appeal decision, Hale v. Jennings Bros. [1938] 1 All E.R. 179. Moreover, opinions contrary to that of Lord Macmillan have been powerfully expressed by Barwick C.J. and Windeyer J. in Benning v. Wong (1969) 122 C.L.R. 249, 274-275, 318-319.

      Similarly, a plaintiff with standing to sue, including on my approach a member of the household, should be entitled to recover in nuisance for damage to chattels: Midwood & Co. Ltd v. Manchester Corporation [1905] 2 K.B. 597; Moss v. Christchurch Rural District Council [1925] 2 K.B. 750; Halsey v. Esso Petroleum Co. Ltd. [1961] 1 W.L.R. 683; British Celanese Ltd. v. A.H. Hunt (Capacitors) Ltd. [1969] 1 W.L.R. 159; Howard Electric Ltd. v. A.J. Mooney Ltd. [1974] 2 N.Z.L.R. 762. If a husband's car and his wife's are both damaged by spray from an adjacent property, they should alike be entitled to sue in nuisance even if he alone has a proprietary interest in the land.

      The principles which I prefer might perhaps help the plaintiffs in the dust action, but nothing further can be said on that matter as the nature of the complaints in that action were not the subject of any of the agreed issues submitted to your Lordships. If the adoption of such principles might add marginally to building or operating costs in some cases, that could hardly be a more significant argument against them than is the cost of reasonable safeguards in any other field of the law.

      Turning to the television action, I am in the happier position of being able to agree with all your Lordships and the Court of Appeal that this cannot succeed. Television has become a significant and, to many, almost an indispensable amenity of domestic life. For the reasons given more fully by Robins J. in Nor-Video Services Ltd v. Ontario Hydro (1978) 84 D.L.R. (3d) 221 and my noble and learned friend Lord Goff, I agree that, in appropriate cases, television and radio reception can and should be protected by the law of nuisance, although no doubt rights to reception cannot be acquired by prescription. Inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs and many another concentrated urban area might react with incredulity, and justifiably so, to the suggestion that the amenity of television and radio reception is fairly comparable to a view of the surroundings of their homes. Neither in nature nor in value is that so. It may be suspected that only a lawyer would think of such a suggestion.

      What in my opinion must defeat an action for interference with television reception by the construction of a building, not only in this but in most cases, is the principle of reasonable user, of give and take. The 1983 decision in Germany of the Federal Supreme Court to which Lord Goff refers rejected a claim by neighbours, whose television reception of certain programmes had been spoilt by the erection of a nine-storey hospital, to connect their aerial to the system in the defendants' building. In the translation available to your Lordships the essential ground of the decision appears thus:

 "In respect of the so-called negative adverse effects there is no gap in the [Civil] Code; on the contrary it deliberately leaves it to the freedom of the owner to use his property as he wishes within the framework of the Code, as long as he does not cross the boundary of neighbouring land by the emission of imponderables."

      Although turning on the Code, that is of interest as a matter of comparative law and some help. The common law case most closely in point that I have been able to find is the decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, delivered by Kluczynski J., in People ex rel. Hoogasian v. Sears, Roebuck & Co. 58 A.L.R. 3d. 1136 (1972). These were appeals in proceedings to stop the further construction of a building in Chicago which would reach 110 storeys or 1350ft. (Compare the 50 storeys and 800ft. of the Canary Wharf tower; the Chicago building had reached 50 storeys when the proceedings were commenced.) Distortions on television screens were expected because the broadcasting antennae of Chicago stations were lower than the designed structure. The Supreme Court identified the principal issue as being whether

 "defendant has a legal right to use the air space above its property subject only to legislative limitation, or, stated conversely, whether an individual or class of individuals has the right to limit the use of such property on the basis that interference with television reception constitutes an actionable nuisance."

      The court saw the case as one of competing legitimate "commercial" interests, both of concern to the public. It said that responsibility for inadequate television reception in certain areas rested more with the broadcaster's choice of location than with the height of the defendant's building. "Therefore disruption of television signals initiated by totally independent third parties over which the defendant has no control cannot be the basis for enjoining the full legal use and enjoyment of defendant's property."

      As will be seen, this proposition was qualified later in the judgment, but first one should note that what immediately followed was a reference to United States v. Causby 328 U.S. 256 (1946) where the Supreme Court of the United States held that a landowner could not claim exclusive possession of unlimited airspace above his property--"[the] ancient doctrine that at common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe . . . has no place in the modern world"--but could claim exclusive possession of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere; and that the continual flying of army bombers emitting noise and glare as low as 83ft. above the claimants' land amounted to a taking for which compensation must be paid. Then there followed in the Sears Roebuck judgment a proposition that had been applied in a Massachusetts case about radio transmission: "Doubtless, in the absence of controlling police regulation, one may erect a structure upon his land as high as he desires and is able": Richmond Bros Inc. v. Hagemann 268 N.E. 2nd 680, 682 (1971). Finally the Illinois court said:

 ". . . it is clear to us that absent legislation to the contrary, defendant has a proprietary right to construct a building to its desired height and that completion of the project would not constitute a nuisance under the circumstances of this case."

      The qualification is important. Control of building height is such a common feature of modern town planning regimes that it would be inadequate to say that at the present day owners of the soil generally enjoy their rights usque ad coelum et ad inferos. Although the primary responsibility for enforcement falls on the administering authorities, I see no reason why neighbours prejudicially affected should not be able to sue in nuisance if a building does exceed height, bulk or location restrictions. For then the developer is not making either a lawful or a reasonable use of landowning rights. This is to treat planning measures not as creating rights of action for breach of statutory duty but as denoting a standard of what is acceptable in the community.

      In the light of the versatility of human malevolence and ingenuity, it is as well to add a second qualification. The malicious erection of a structure for the purpose of interfering with television reception should be actionable in nuisance on the principle of such well-known cases as Christie v. Davey [1893] 1 Ch. 316 and Hollywood Silver Fox Farm Ltd v. Emmett [1936] 2 K.B. 468. Obviously this has no bearing on the present case or on the vast majority of cases. All the same it is not inconceivable. In his book Mr Justice Linden cites the case of Attorney-General of Manitoba v. Campbell (1983) 26 C.C.L.T. 168 where a farmer was found to have put up a 74ft. steel tower of no practical use in his farming, directly in line with the runway of an adjoining airport, with no purpose other than as part of a maliciously conceived plan to prevent the upgrading of the airport. This he did just before the effective date of a planning order covering the height and locality of adjacent structures. A mandatory injunction to dismantle the tower was granted and obeyed and not appealed from. Even so the defendant did appeal successfully against an award of solicitor-and-client costs, and two of the three members of the Court of Appeal thought that he would have had a good chance of success in an appeal against the injunction: see [1985] 4 W.W.R. 334. I do not think, however, that the view that malice is irrelevant in nuisance would have wide acceptance today.