Neighbour Sues Council as Montenegro Embassy Row in London Reaches the High Court

The conversion of a five-bedroom family home on Cambridge Street in Pimlico, central London, into the embassy of Montenegro has triggered a neighbourhood dispute that has now reached the desk of a High Court judge.

The first stirrings of trouble concerned the flag. In a submission to the council this spring, one resident argued that the new embassy's flagpole and flag stuck out among Cambridge Street's Grade II-listed homes. Another critic described Montenegro's red flag with its gold border as gaudy and out of keeping with the quietly dignified whitewash late-Regency frontages designed by Thomas Cubitt.

Some critics, frustrated that no planning application preceded the installation of the flagpole and plaque, were partly placated when the chargé d'affaires of the west Balkans state put on evening drinks and canapés. One resident commented drily that it might have been diplomatic to have done that at the start.

But the gathering did not convince everyone. Diana Simpson, an involuntary next-door neighbour of the embassy, has taken the matter to court. Simpson, 35, is a Stanford graduate who lives with her parents on Cambridge Street and has lived on the street for more than three decades; her father is a former US diplomat.

Simpson is suing Westminster city council, applying for judicial review and potential damages. Her case is that when the embassy belatedly sought planning permission for its change of use and flagpole, the local authority failed to take into account the impact on her mental health of the arrival next door of Montenegro, a country that has been involved in recent scrapes with Russia.

Simpson receives disability benefits after being diagnosed with clinical anxiety, long Covid and a functional neurological disorder. In her statement of grounds she says the embassy's arrival has so unsettled her that her nights are regularly affected.

She says she frequently feels the need to sleep somewhere other than her lifelong bedroom to gain some marginal relief — sometimes pre-emptively, sometimes in the middle of the night when a creak triggers a primal fear response that an intruder might be entering her room from the embassy, even though she knows the possibility is very slim and the response mostly irrational.

Citing breaches of the human rights and equality acts, Simpson has said she has considered whether it remains tenable for her to continue living in the house she had expected to have the option of living in for the rest of her life, adding that leaving would wrench her from a local tight-knit community.

Simpson told the Guardian she is confident in her case, which alleges the council failed to take her conditions into account, acted irrationally and ran a flawed public consultation by keeping a closed mind to objections after the Foreign Office gave its permission.

In its defence statement, Westminster city council denies the allegations and writes: 'There is no plausible interference with the claimant's home or her private and family life.' The council is seeking a summary judgment in the case.

The Pimlico case is the latest instance of tensions between small countries seeking space in the capital and the residents who find an embassy suddenly next door.