Flat-footed: welcome to the floorboard wars

Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, this wasn’t – at least not yet – and it probably passed much of the country by, especially given the rival distractions of recent weeks. It was nonetheless a lawsuit that will have been followed in compulsive detail by at least two groups of people: those who own their own flats – who are technically leaseholders but prefer to think of themselves as owner-occupiers – and the freeholders and managers of their blocks. Oh, and never forget the lawyers.

The case, heard at Central London County Court, pitted Sergey and Maria Grazhdankin against their upstairs neighbours Medhi Guissi and Meriem El Harouchi, and centred on the perennial issue, for flat-dwellers, of noise. But the reason the case commanded so much attention was that the Grazhdankins’s complaints concerned not just any sort of noise, but the noise generated by upstairs neighbours living in a flat with wooden floors.