Presbar Diecastings Ltd v GW Atkins & Sons Ltd & Anor

Lesley Anderson KC & Oliver McEntee (instructed by Bermans, Manchester ) for the Claimant

Richard Clegg & Maxwell Myers (instructed by Shakespeare Martineau, Leicester ) for the Defendants

This judgment was handed down remotely at 10am on 25 February 2026 by circulation to the parties or their representatives by email and by release to The National Archives.

"(1) �At least where there is no direct evidence as to what the parties knew and did not know, and as a corollary of the objective approach to the interpretation of contracts, the question is what knowledge a reasonable observer would have expected and believed both contracting parties to have had, and each to have assumed the other to have had, at the time of their contract;

(2) that includes specialist or unusual knowledge which only parties entering into a contractual engagement of the sort in question might reasonably be assumed to have; and it also includes knowledge which it is to be inferred, from the nature of the actions they have in fact undertaken, that they had or must have had;