I sometimes wonder if a property lawyer dreamt up the idea that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Over the years, it’s certainly been a lucrative concept for the legal profession, especially when said castle is worth a few bob. Barely a week goes on when one of the posher papers doesn’t feature an expensive spat in an equally expensive neighbourhood. The latest feud I’ve seen involves a brook that runs through two properties – one owned by an artisan potter, the other a part-time painter – in the bucolic Leicestershire village of Thrussington. The row over who owns the right to this peaceful babbling has so far cost the rival parties a nerve-jangling £300,000 after it was heard by three judges in the Court of Appeal last month.
According to research by Good Move, two thirds of UK homeowners say they have ‘problems’ with neighbours in the past and one in ten say they have got so bad they have reported them to the council. So, what makes the British such uniquely unreasonable neighbours?
Barely a week goes by without a posh paper reporting a spat in an exclusive neighbourhood.
One reason lies in our infrastructure. Figures show the UK is one of the most densely populated in Europe, well ahead of our major neighbours like France and Germany. What’s more, we have 41 million vehicles serving 70 million people, so no wonder you can’t always find a parking space outside your house – one of the major causes for flare-ups. Plus, many of our homes date back to the Victorian and Edwardian eras which were thrown up at breakneck speed and in terraces to save time, money and space. Over six million houses were built between 1837 and 1901 alone. When the larger properties are split up, often they are only divided by paper-thin partitions and wooden joists. Many of us are subjected to the choppy dialogue and gun fights of our neighbours’ Netflix binges.
We also move around more, so many of us don’t get to know who’s living next door or trust them to stick around long enough for us to bother to try. Long gone are the days when we chatted over the garden wall – or introduced ourselves by asking for a cup of sugar. Half of Britons admit they barely say a word to the people next door, and three quarters don’t even know their names, according to a survey by the Skipton Building Society, leading to all sorts of wild speculations about what they might be getting up to.
And the more money we have, it seems, the more there is to row over. A few million in the bank is all it takes for disputes to scale up in size from mundane rows about driveway access – into squabbles over subterranean wine cellars and helipads. Robbie Williams has been falling out with his neighbours (included Jimmy Page of Led Zepplin) in Holland Park over everything from his plans to excavate a basement swimming pool to cutting down some trees, since he moved into his £17.5 million mansion over a decade ago. From his side of the fence, Jimmy, whose home is actually a Victorian castle, says the vibrations from the works would damage the ancient paintings and frescoes in his home. In the Cotswolds, David and Victoria Beckham were accused by a neighbour of bringing ‘suburbia’ to the countryside, by asking for planning permission to renovate some buildings into a suite of home offices. Meanwhile, over in Suffolk, singer Ed Sheeran reportedly paid one complaining neighbour to go away and bought her house when she kept objecting to building work at his £3.7 million estate.
But dig a little deeper, and could there be something else in our national character that makes us such unreasonable neighbours? I think we cling onto rather fixed ideas that there’s a right and wrong way to do things. So when we see how new arrivals – or perhaps the new money – are simply not playing by these unwritten rules’ we start to seethe. That could encompass anything from neighbours using a noisy leaf-blower over a modest rake to having a different (and possibly higher) taste in garden fencing. Of course, most people start off not wanting to make a scene. But when nothing changes, Brits tend to simmer until righteous indignation turns into passive-aggressive pettiness – with notes stuck under car windscreens and anonymous calls to the council.
Dr Mike Talbot is a mediator with 30 years’ experience of untangling rows between British neighbours. He points out it doesn’t help that we wind each other up with Neighbourhood Watch schemes and Nextdoor community bulletin boards, which are more like organised ways to grass each other up than communities. Old-fashioned envy often underlies many neighbourhood disputes, says Mike. ‘It’s that uncomfortable feeling of “What does it say about me if my neighbour can afford this, and I can’t?” These can then surface as complaints over the neighbour’s lifestyle.’
This reminded me of a golden era when my husband and I were newly-wed young urban professionals, who still had the cash to throw around on home improvements. When the builders turned up, we’d get lambasted by the pompous next-door neighbour, who accused us of having ‘conversion-itis’ (her word) for daring to improve our new home.
The proximity of British properties lends itself to another neighbourhood sport: ‘curtain twitching’. This was highlighted for a friend of mine who was getting suspicious about the number of officials turning up at his doorstep due to anonymous complaints. When my friend hired a single workman to clear some rubble in the cellar, a council inspector turned up to investigate a report that he was ‘excavating’ a basement floor. (‘If only’, my mate said ruefully.) Next, it was a visit over ‘unreasonable noise’ – the fact their dog sometimes ran to the end of the garden to bark at squirrels. When his 14-year-old daughter had a screaming teenage tantrum over her right to use her phone at all times, two hours later social services came knocking, claiming they’d had reports of violent ‘child abuse’.
Needless to say, once again the officials made a quick exit when the door was opened by the said smiling teen, who had since snapped out of it and could be heard practising for her Grade 8 piano exam. Finally, my friend used a Freedom of Information request to find out from the local council how many complaints had been anonymously filed against him. A total of ten over five years which could only have come from the woman next door with whom he’d never exchanged more than a few words the whole time they lived there. And there lies yet another reason for so much discord. There are neighbours like these in every community. The problem is that some get rather good at donning a cloak of civic responsibility to bend the ear of council officials for their personal vendettas. Most neighbourhood disputes really come down to just two things: differences in taste and lifestyle.
Once you’ve accepted other people won’t change just because you think they should, neighbouring miraculously gets easier. A cheery wave when you’re putting the bins out goes a long way, adds Dr Talbot. As he points out: ‘Even the occasional “hello” in the driveway helps build some sort of rapport, which can give you invaluable credit when you need to raise an issue. If you’ve been seething for weeks about something your neighbour does, and then you suddenly snap by banging on their front door, you’re off to the worst possible start.’ Absolutely. Not to mention it could save you a small fortune in legal bills.
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