Trouble with them next door

BUY NOW

Several years ago Emily Cockayne produced a book about the dirt, the noises and the smells which surrounded even our more respectable ancestors from the late 16th to the late 18th century. It was a fun account, full of details of disputes and complaints, well-strewn with manure, and it was obvious that usually the troubles stemmed from neighbouring houses.

Now she has written what might well be regarded as a companion volume, since she has taken on the whole subject of neighbourliness — or, more often, the lack of it. But she has broadened her field to include every period from the later Middle Ages (which is when records of local spats begin to become available) to the present day, a huge swathe of time and social and architectural change. Not surprisingly, the structure of her book tends to collapse under such a mass of material, most of it not very carefully examined.

It would be ungrateful to ignore the book’s jollier moments. We all like hearing about ancient misbehaviour, especially if we can relate it in some way to our own experiences. When two Elizabethan neighbours in Houndsditch indulged in adultery, avidly observed by the couple in the adjoining house, details of disarrayed clothing make the whole incident real to us, including the final remark “having so done he wyped his yard on her Smocke”. The author makes the point that such spying was then regarded as positively moral, part of the duty of more God-fearing parishioners, but that innumerable other adulteries were probably hidden and thus remain hidden from us too. If her account seems over-weighted with legal wrangles and violent scenes, up to and including murders, that is because such things enter the public domain and are recorded.

But here already a wider dimension to the topic becomes apparent. People form sexual and romantic attachments with whoever is accessible, and in the past this usually meant others living nearby. Among the impressively piled-up detail in this book, most of it from parish or court records, there seems little perception of this overall picture.

There is no mention of the age-old tendency to fall in love with the Girl Next Door or of well-known examples of this such as Keats and Fanny Brawne, Hazlitt and the landlord’s daughter or indeed Anne Frank and teenage boy in hiding with her. And what of the Lady in the Van, the neighbour that fate and his own decency wished on Alan Bennett?

There is very little on neighbours in literature, and the whole enormous issue of class is largely unexplored, as we jump on the same page from accusations of snake-keeping in exclusive Great Portland Street to “’Ackney and the ’ouses in between”.

The general conclusion, that in poor societies without welfare people depend more on neighbours, is surely right but hardly remarkable. The author simplifies the complex subjects of suburban growth, town planning and redevelopment beyond recognition — and doesn’t seem to realise that up to the Seventies huge numbers of Londoners lived in terrace houses divided into bedsitters where neighbourly co-operation over bath-times was essential. (Evening Standard of the time used to have whole pages of advertisements for these lettings). She gallops without pause through thickets of 20th century social history: Homes for Heroes, the blitz, the blackout, spies, evacuation, then a few pages later we’re onto racism, traffic increase, birth control, hedge-heights and wife-swapping … Phew!

Somewhere inside this book several other books on different, interesting themes are struggling to get out.

Save up to 20% off books when you buy from our Bookshop with free P&P