When he was growing up, Paul St Hilaire Jr thought his dad was the next best thing to Willy Wonka: no one else’s dad sold ice-cream for a living.
“I remember sitting in the van, eating my Mr Whippy and feeling superior to children queueing up outside,” St Hilaire Jr remembered.
But for the past 13 years, the son – now a solicitor – has been fighting to get his dad’s ice-cream pitch back in a David and Goliath battle with the local council. The family have been to court about 10 times. Next month they will take their case to the high court.
“It would be funny if it wasn’t so heartbreaking,” said St Hilaire Sr, 70. “All this fuss, upset and expense over ice-cream.”
St Hilaire Sr began trading on King William Walk in Greenwich in the early 1980s to support his seven children, who now largely work in the NHS and education. The contested pitch on the historic boulevard is one of the most popular spots in Greenwich: look north, and you can see the Royal Naval College and the Cutty Sark – look south, and you can see the park and the Royal Observatory.
“I loved selling ice-cream there, it was beautiful and busy,” said St Hilaire Sr. “My customers came from all over the world but had one similarity: they didn’t want the expensive ice-cream sold by the National Maritime Museum nearby – they wanted a Mr Whippy.”
But in 2004, the council started regulating ice-cream vans. King William Walk was closed for business because it was too narrow to accommodate ice-cream punters and pedestrians alike.
In 2011, however, the National Maritime Museum opened its Sammy Ofer wing, substantially widening a section of King William Walk. The St Hilaires saw a chance to nab the best ice-cream pitch in Greenwich and applied for a licence.
That’s when battle commenced: the council rejected the application and held firm to its decision: “King William Walk is a narrow and busy historic street,” said a spokesperson. “We need to make sure everyone can move around safely and easily, so there are restrictions on street trading here to avoid queues blocking the way.”
In fact, the St Hilaires challenged this claim in the magistrates court in 2013 and won, the magistrate granting them the gold-ticket licence the council had refused. But Greenwich council doubled down, paying lawyers £52,000 to appeal against the case in Woolwich crown court in 2015.
Again, the ruling came back in favour of the St Hilaires. This time, the council was ordered to grant the licence and reimburse the family £4,500 in costs.
When St Hilaire Sr applied to renew his street trading licence, however, it was rejected – on the basis that the council had, without consultation or publicity, decided the entirely of King William Walk was no longer an approved street on which to trade.
St Hilaire Jr points out that the claim the pavement is too narrow at the contested pitch was rejected by both the magistrate in 2013 and the judge in 2015. But the council also says that it consulted on the proposal for itinerant ice-cream vans on the walk. “The majority of responses agreed with our approach,” it said.
St Hilaire Jr disagrees. “There were just 25 responses to the consultation,” he said. “If you discount all the internal ones and the public ones citing the same overcrowding concern the courts rejected over a decade ago, that consultation comes out in our favour.”
In any case, he added, the consultation was about itinerant vans. What the family want is a permanent pitch.
“The council made the decision against permanent pitches because they claimed to have had 13 complaints against my dad,” said St Hilaire Jr. “But the so-called complaints weren’t complaints at all; they were just questions about trading,” he said. “There wasn’t a single complaint about my dad.”
In fact, the only complaint against St Hilaire Sr was found in an email written by a local councillor and released under the Freedom of Information Act, who called him a “pest”. “When I took them to the ombudsman, they were found guilty of service failure maladministration and [the ombudsman] ordered them to reconsider,” said St Hilaire Jr.
It is not the first time, St Hilaire Jr said, that the council has used concerning tactics. “At one point, a member of the council called my employer, suggesting I was helping my dad during working hours,” he said. “But I wasn’t, so that didn’t work.”
He said the family feel victimised by the council’s focus on them, pointing to 19 enforcement notices levied against his father between April and May 2016. “We successfully contested every single fine and enforcement notice, but each one cost us considerable time and money,” he said.
The council even lowered the kerb at exactly the place where St Hilaire Sr parked his van – at a cost of £4,138. The museum’s own ice-cream van now trades just metres away from the contested pitch.
After the ombudsman told the council to reconsider its stance on permanent pitches … nothing happened. In the hiatus, St Hilaire Sr was forced to sell his ice-cream van. He now works as a lorry driver.
Then, amazingly, in 2021, the council told the St Hilaires part of the walk was to be designated for street trading. A few months later, however, this decision was reversed. The council has never explained why.
Finally in 2023, Greenwich council confirmed the walk was not designated for street trading. It is St Hilaire’s challenge to this that will be decided at the high court next month.
As for the council’s statement that there are many other places to trade from, St Hilaire Jr said he has repeatedly asked the council to give them a different site. “They’ve never given us a date for any of the meetings they vaguely mention might happen – and have now said they can’t see us because court proceedings are ongoing.”
