Quintain and Sisk secure anti-trespass injunction for Wembley site

Quintain and John Sisk & Son have secured a new legal order to keep trespassers off cranes overlooking Wembley Stadium.

Sisk is delivering a new £220m neighbourhood called North East Lands at Wembley Park in north London. It will eventually include more than 2,000 new homes, public realm and a base for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

The site has been targeted by trespassers – sometimes called “free runners” or “urban explorers” – climbing on cranes and filming their exploits. Last summer a video posted on YouTube showed one such individual looking down at Wembley Stadium from a crane.

Trespassing on construction sites is not a criminal offence and Construction News has previously examined the increasing use of injunctions by contractors to stop incursions. If these are breached, those going onto sites are breaking the law.

Quintain and Sisk secured an initial injunction for the Wembley site in December, and this was extended last week, making it valid until 2025.

A Quintain spokesperson said the injunction was “standard industry practice” to stop “illicit entry into construction sites and individuals placing themselves and others in danger”.

They added: “We take the safety of the public and our staff extremely seriously. Individuals who engage in persistently disruptive and dangerous behaviour put themselves and others at risk of significant harm. We will always act to prevent them from doing so.”

When granting the injunction extension last week, Judge Jonathan Simpkiss referred to the September 2019 death of Johnny Turner, 28, who fell to his death from an eight-storey scaffolding in Waterloo, London, as an example of the need to prevent unauthorised access to sites.

In March 2021, when Mace secured an injunction to stop trespass at its Gotham City building in the City of London, the judge in that case said that since 2018, all but one of the construction sites in London involving new buildings of 150 metres or above had been targeted by urban explorers. The only one that had not, Berkeley Homes’ South Quay Plaza in Canary Wharf, had an injunction in place before work began.