Neighbours

I find it bizarre that there are so many people in our capital that we can easily picture and recollect, hold so many opinions on, and yet not actually speak to. The lack of ice breaking in London, leading us to rarely converse with strangers on the tube or bus, only adds to the unease of speaking to people in our often-changing neighbourhoods.

The pressures of working life to the Internet, have been blamed for making us all more reclusive. Another popular argument is the sheer number of properties on short term lets on London's sprawling property market.

According to a recent survey by Norwich Union,  London does not do well in comparison to the rest of the country. . 68% of us are unlikely to know our neighbours, compared to the national average 56%. Only a fifth of Londoners speak to their neighbours once a week, while a third do nationally.

We are also the least trusting, interestingly we share our suspicious nature with Brummies who also top the table with 11% trusting nobody in their neighbourhood.

Since moving to London I have never met my neighbours on move in day. I'm certainly not a rare statistic , a recent poll suggested only one in five Londoners have been welcomed to the neighbourhood on arrival.

It is a unique experience being a student in the capital. Over three years of study, rather than living in the so-called "bubble" of student life, like some campuses in smaller cities and large towns, we live in the sprawling suburbs of London. It is in London, in low cost, close proximity housing , that we become acutely aware of the habits of our neighbours.

Over my four years of study, I have had neighbours which remain a backdrop in charting my memories over the different places I have lived.

My foundation year was spent in a housing estate in Stratford, (interestingly I had no neighbours, all the houses were burnt and boarded up) and then divided between Barking and Camberwell. The campus in Barking, was next to an Asda where local kids rode around on horses bareback in the car park and field,  next to a huge roundabout spitting cars out of London.

My second year was a delightful experience on the neighbour front. Living in a tiny flat, above a Turkish pizza place on Whitecross street, we looked out on a Peabody estate where every Sunday morning you could see  an elderly couple  dancing to big band and swing in there living room.

When I moved into a shared Georgian semi in De Beauvoir town, alarm bells started ringing at the different coloured light bulbs next door.

After a few weeks our pieced together information amounted to ; they were both Vegans, home schooled their children, made grotesque metal sculptures for a living, and washed their brown Volvo with a mop on Tuesday afternoons.

So when I moved from this slightly more upstate address to Hackney, I was prepared for the worst on the neighbour front, but not quite as odd as it has turned out. My current neighbour is in her late eighties, and has adopted twp feral cats as her own. Every hour she shouts for one of them, "Skippy!", pronounced, "Skip-paaaay!!", a bit like a retired pirate.

To illustrate her dedication to these felines, if further evidence is needed, I often see her silhouetted against her back door at two in the morning, hands the size of dishpans, laying out Ice Cream tub lids with rising quantities of cat food, snaking from the garden and through into her basement flat. 

On our first actual meeting, compounding her eccentricity, she offered me "un-elasticated socks and cigarettes" as a bribe. She did so while peering over her fence, offering them in exchange for a cupboard we planned on burning. Interestingly, her hands didn't look nearly as big in daylight.

My sister has a neighbour who at 7pm each evening slams his front door, gets in his car and puts his seat belt on, only to make three revs of the engine and re-parks his red ford as close as possible to his fence on the drivers side. He then gets out the passenger side, checks his judgement, before retreating back to his flat.

Later in her block, the neighbour upstairs begins his ritual. She was worried, quite rightly so, as to what the repetitive thumping sound at midnight was when she first moved in. But after some apprehensive silent listening with her flatmates, they finally worked out vacuum cleaning was his midnight vigil. I've never seen her look so relieved.

According to the Norwich Union survey, only half of us even know a neighbours name. ( I presume I'm included in this statistic, unless the lady next door is in fact called, "Catwoman".)

The appeal of a community atmosphere is very much apparent in our rapidly growing cities, yet while "integration is very much of the moment, it is surprising how many Londoners according to the survey want to move away from their neighbours, rather than get to know them. One in three, which is three times the national average, are willing to move just to escape from their neighbours.

London is home to an eighth of the English population with four people per square metre on public transport, and escalating property prices, valid reasons why Londoners treasure their personal space. We are so wary of people infringing on this valuable personal space that we are quick to jump on intruders. Only until the rat race becomes a bit more humane to the participants will we see social, integrated neighbourhoods. 

Until then I'm going to continue hiding from the neighbours. For the foreseeable future I'm stuck with the antics of "Catwoman",...I wonder what she calls me?