4 in 5 couldn’t pick out neighbours in a police line-up

IN the faceless digital age of social media, many claim to have hundreds of friends and regard themselves as sociable.

But it seems in the real world, the nation has an issue.

A major poll has revealed that an astonishing four out of five of us would not know our neighbours if we were asked to pick them from a police line-up.

While most of us have a bond with colleagues at work, those who live next door are often strangers.

Not surprisingly, the biggest failures in the identification parade test are in London, where only one in ten would be able to recognise their neighbours.

However in Northern Ireland only one in 50 do not know their neighbours.

The isolation of millions of families and individuals was charted in a survey carried out by The Big Lunch, a lottery-funded project that aims to encourage people to socialise with their neighbours.

Big Lunch spokesman Peter Stewart said: ‘The research shows how much potential there is for people to get to know their neighbours better, replacing anonymous neighbourhoods with closer ties and stronger communities.’

While links between neighbours have always been weak in major cities, the gulf between people living next to each other may have widened as a result of the development of social media and new technology that lessens the need or incentive for people to talk to each other.

The findings, gathered from a YouGov poll of more than 4,000 people, found that overall 83 per cent say they would not be able to pick out their neighbours in a police station identification parade.

Instead the people they treat as neighbours are those they work with. ‘Many people have a stronger sense of belonging to their workplace than to the street they live on,’ the researchers said. Six out of ten said they had a strong bond with colleagues against fewer than half, 45 per cent, who claimed a sense of belonging in the neighbourhood where they live.

The greatest sense of regional identity is found in Yorkshire, the poll found, where more than two thirds, 68 per cent, say that they have a strong sense of belonging. Loyalty to Yorkshire is greater than that found in Scotland, where only 66 per cent declared a strong sense of belonging.

Nevertheless, people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all feel a stronger connection to their own part of the country than to the UK as a whole, it said. Only in England is there a strong sense of belonging to the UK.

The researchers said the decline of neighbourliness is a result of ‘changes in the political landscape which have caused divisions among the population’. They also say digital media has contributed towards a breakdown in the quality of human interactions.

The Big Lunch project aims to get more than nine million people to sit down with neighbours for Sunday lunch on June 3.