Eunice Day’s breaking point came when her neighbours asked if she would move her car from a communal grass verge in their cul-de-sac so that it could be mowed. After several weeks of polite hostilities, Day stormed a neighbour’s home in the Dorset town of Ferndown, a row ensued, and the resulting scuffle left the 81-year-old in court charged with assault.
In Bedminster, Bristol, fed-up locals have taken a more passive-aggressive approach to ‘outsiders’ parking on their streets. Suburban vigilantes have been creeping out and sellotaping notes to windscreens urging their owners to park outside their own homes instead. Over in the village of Polstead, Suffolk, meanwhile, one couple are contemplating a £160,000 legal bill, run up attempting to force their neighbours to take down a fence as part of a long-running row over access.
The Bible urges us to love our neighbours, but a recent survey by mobile phone brand OnePlus suggests that a third of us don’t even know their names. And long hours sequestered at home during the pandemic have ramped up our collective levels of frustration with their behaviour. Noise complaints in England increased 54 per cent between 2019/20 and 2020/21, according to the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has seen a corresponding increase in the number of people seeking its advice in disputes over territory.
Making a call to a council helpline or surveyor is one thing. But what is really fascinating is why some relatively minor problems escalate so dramatically. Mike Talbot, a psychotherapist and founder of UK Mediation, recalls, with a dry laugh, the case of a neighbour who became so enraged by the light from the adjacent property’s conservatory windows in the evenings that, rather than draw their own curtains, they demanded the neighbour’s window be blacked out or their light removed. ‘The judge told them not to be stupid,’ he says.
Martin Burns, head of ‘alternative dispute resolution’ research and development at RICS, has spent three decades mediating neighbour disputes. ‘You hear horror stories about people losing their life savings arguing about 13cm of land,’ he says. ‘It is a “king of the castle” attitude, that sense of propriety, and rage that someone has the cheek to encroach on my property.’
Typical combatants, says Burns, have ‘a lot of time on their hands’ and spend a lot of that time at home. They may also have health problems. A recent study published in the journal BMC Public Health found a clear correlation between people losing their cool over noisy neighbours and those suffering from chronic pain, insomnia, depression and anxiety.
One neighbour became so enraged by the light from an adjacent conservatory that, rather than draw their own curtains, they demanded the neighbour’s window be blacked out
Talbot adds that those who escalate disputes often have what could politely be called a fragile ego. ‘They are somebody who finds battles with people just so they can win and get some aggrandisement,’ he says. ‘They want to triumph over people, as an antidote to feeling disliked, belittled or humiliated. It doesn’t make sense, but it goes quite deep, sometimes back to their childhoods. Donald Trump is a nice example. He doesn’t have people he disagrees with; he has mortal enemies.’
Often quarrels begin when a newcomer challenges the status quo. Take the long-running and highly entertaining feud between Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who has owned his home in Holland Park, west London, since the early 1970s, and the singer Robbie Williams, who bought the house next door in 2013. The pair have been engaged in a lengthy dispute over Williams’s plans to dig a basement beneath the 46-room mansion ever since. Page protested that vibrations from the work would damage his home; it took five years of wrangling (and some very large legal bills) before Williams was granted planning consent in 2019 – on the condition that the basement would have to be dug using hand tools only.
Eunice Day was another incomer, who ignored requests to move her Audi from the grass verge beside her rented house and also, neighbours claim, escalated matters by deliberately blocking a private footpath with her wheelie bin and ‘intimidating’ them by sitting outside their homes on her mobility scooter. She was prosecuted after a showdown with one of these neighbours, Suzanne Webb, during which Ms Webb’s mobile phone was knocked from her hand. Last month, Day appeared at Poole Magistrates’ Court where she was convicted of assault and given a conditional discharge and a £646 bill for costs.
Parking rows and arguments over building works are classic neighbour-rage territory. But few things rile neighbours up more than border disputes. In 2015, Gary and Kerry Hambling bought a chocolate-box cottage near Polstead, Suffolk. It came with stables and a paddock, situated across the driveway owned by their neighbours Garry and Jenny Wakerly.
Things went wrong when the Hamblings started parking vehicles in their field. The Wakerlys retaliated by fencing off their drive, effectively penning the Hamblings into their home. The Hamblings went first to Norwich County Court and – when that case failed – on to the High Court to force the Wakerlys to remove the fence. But the judge, Sir Anthony Mann, ruled that the Wakerlys could do what they liked with their drive, and the fence stayed put. The Hamblings now have a legal bill estimated at £160,000.
To try to prevent cases like these, the government has suggested that civil cases, including neighbourly altercations, be automatically referred to free mediation. Burns welcomes the idea. ‘At the heart of many disputes is a lack of information,’ he says. ‘You take up a position based on what you think you know, but mediation gives both sides a better understanding. If a chartered surveyor tells you the real location of a boundary, and gives a clear explanation and evidence, it can take the heat out of a situation and give people a reality check. Then we try to come up with a compromise solution. Mediation is aimed at win-win, where everyone feels they have got something.’
The other solution to a neighbour dispute could be an exit strategy. If the people living next door are really that awful you could always sell up and try your luck elsewhere.
But cutting your losses could be tricky. Vendors must declare any problems with the neighbours, and open warfare with number nine isn’t exactly a selling point. If you try to cover it up you could find yourself in court anyway – not over car parking or fences, but for misselling.
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