You won’t be able to use your premises properly without some rights over adjoining property. I’ll give you some examples.
You may need a right of way over someone else’s land to get to your front door. Unless your front door will open directly onto the pavement, you need a right of way over the property in between. This might mean the forecourt between the building and the street. If you are taking an office on the upper floor of a building, you need a right of way over the lobbies, stairs and landings you have to use to reach it.
Your premises are going to need services, and – unless it’s electricity from a solar panel on your own roof – you need to get them from somewhere else. You need a right to receive all these services which are going to be coming through pipes wires and cables from outside your premises.
Using the office example again, you need a right to receive water, electricity, and data etc. through the existing pipes wires and cables in the building. The landlords own the rest of the building so it’s the landlords who need to give you these rights. You need to tell your solicitor to make sure that the services you need are all covered in the lease.
If you have repairing obligations in your lease which cannot be carried out without having access to some adjoining property, you need to make sure that a right of access to carry out repair works is granted to you in the lease.
It is traditional for the landlord to give the tenant a right of support and protection from the rest of the building.
If the rights you need are over land which does not belong to your landlord, your solicitor will need to check that the landlord actually owns the necessary rights to pass on to you.
There would be endless litigation in the courts if every right needed needed to be exactly spelled-out in every lease. To save the day, the law has a principle that when a lease is granted, it is “deemed” – automatically assumed – to include any rights which the premises already have over other adjoining premises and which are “continuous and apparent” – obvious, in other words. That sometimes fills in the gaps when a necessary right has not been set out in the lease.
But you can’t rely on that. Many leases have a clause in them saying that this assumption will not apply. So, it is always best to get it specified in “the heads of terms” exactly what you will need from outside your premises to get to them and to be able to use them properly.