‘Build build build’ — just not next door to me

When Boris shouted “Build build build” out of the TV set, I did not imagine he meant next door. But my neighbours have taken his instruction to heart.

To a degree, I am sympathetic. If I was locked down with two teenagers I might also want to punch up the roof and build a loft extension to put as much distance between us as possible.

Like many working Londoners, until the coronavirus pandemic arrived, I was blissfully unconcerned with the fact that home builders kept the same Monday to Friday hours that I did. But in recent weeks I have become deeply acquainted with my neighbours’ builders’ taste in loud techno and their coffee routine.

It feels like a violation of the unspoken social contract of our interminable national lockdown. A rejection of the feeling that since March, we are all in this together.

Because we are not all in this together if you are living at your second home in the countryside while your neighbours try to work despite relentless hammering on shared walls.

I think about this betrayal with every crash of roof slate that is dropped three storeys into a pile in my neighbour’s back garden, and every time I am forced to ask a colleague to repeat themselves as a whirr of power tools drowns out their voice over Zoom.

Working from home complicates the frustrations. You can’t report the egregious disruption to your working conditions to HR.

My housemates, situated on the other side of our home, asked if the noise was disruptive, if I was doing OK. Nobody offered to trade places.

In a time when we feel powerless and anxious, it is natural to want to exercise some control over what little we can — our homes. Interior designers are busier than ever, and construction levels are spiking.

One friend in New York returned from a walk one afternoon this autumn to find that scaffolding for an upstairs neighbour’s renovation now blocked all sunlight from her apartment. Another in London has endured constant banging on her bedroom-which-is-also-her-office wall since May while the house next door is modernised.

Planning-application permits required for construction in Britain increased more than 11 per cent in the period from June to October 2020 compared with the year before. Permit requests accelerated into the autumn and will add an estimated 3.1m sq m of additional room, according to data from construction analysts Barbour ABI and Santander — and not all work will require planning permission.

Working from home complicates the frustrations. You can’t report the egregious disruption to your working conditions to HR

For some, it is not about a superficial desire to improve upon the four walls they have been staring at for almost a year, but necessary additions to accommodate returned adult children or elderly parents requiring care.

Outside cities, the drama is less palpable. It has long been a curiosity for me that you are more likely to have a relationship with neighbours in the countryside or suburbs than with people who spend most of their lives mere feet away from you.

Though they are exceedingly kind, Londoners are not famous for neighbourliness. In a brilliant essay on the UK’s social dynamics, in particular passive aggressiveness, New York Times correspondent Sarah Lyall wrote that for 15 years she and her neighbours communicated by epistle only.

If there is something this past year that seemed to really change for the better, it is that more people got to know their neighbours. They shared drinks over garden walls and chatted while taking their dogs or small children out for daily walks.

The betrayal of the construction boom feels all the more tragic because I believed Londoners were making a lot of progress on this front. English awkwardness cut through by necessity.

At 8pm every Thursday during the Clap for the NHS campaign, people came out of their houses and met neighbours they had previously only communicated with through contract agreements to repair the shared fence after the latest windstorm. Some discovered they even liked each other.

From March, my street began to feel like a community. A street-wide WhatsApp was created to co-ordinate volunteering, but evolved. We began to share funny pictures, puzzles and spare tomato seedlings. My house began to dog sit a neighbour’s puppy when her children went back to school. Spare pandemic-baked goods were distributed down the row.

Suddenly there was a way to borrow a cup of sugar, which warmed my American heart. No longer do we just lurk in windows and wonder if they will ever get around to pruning that rose bush, we have fully fledged conversations about things as unBritish as feelings.

But perhaps my American optimism was misplaced. It is not just strangers who have committed these violations, but neighbours, friends, even beloved colleagues. How do I reconcile my knowledge that they are good and kind people, as well as exceptional bakers, with my first-hand experience of the suffering they are causing?

We are all guilty of making exceptions for ourselves. Immanuel Kant brooded over our tendency to rationalise behaviour we know to be against the collective good in the name of self-preservation. Is our national construction boom just another manifestation of toilet-paper mania?

In psychology there is a principle that when others behave badly, we attribute it to a flaw in their character, while when we do wrong, we chalk it up to doing our best in the circumstances. We tell ourselves it is a necessary evil — that the builders will defy all experience and finish the works ahead of schedule, that it is only temporary, that everyone else is doing it.

I may be American by design and disposition, but during my techno-soundtracked morning meeting I am prone to brooding like a proper Londoner. In a move that has me concerned I’ve gone native, rather than ever bring this up with my nice neighbours, who would probably be quite apologetic, as Brits are wont to be, I have made up my mind just to write about it. I may even leave a copy of the weekend paper in their postbox, for when they return.

Madison Darbyshire is the FT’s retail investment reporter

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