the enemy next door!
After a spate of sizzling disputes, have we lost our neighbourliness, asks Max Davidson
Bad neighbours are nothing new. But, this year, ill temper over the fence seems to have reached nasty new levels. Was it the steaming summer or are we losing our good neighbourly spirit in Britain?
Most recently a dispute over a hedge between two adjoining properties went all the way to the High Court. a woman who, in 2014, bought a home for the best part of £1 million in Lyme Regis, dorset, was astonished, on moving in, to discover that her neighbours had severely cut back a hedge along its western border.
The neighbours, Mr and Mrs Oldfield, mounted a strong defence but have been landed with eye-watering legal bills on top of paying £22,500 in damages.
What happened to common sense — a virtue for which the level-headed British used to be famous?
Exhibit two comes from the normally genteel suburb of Richmond in SouthWest London. Normally the closest Richmond comes to fisticuffs occurs when two shoppers make a desperate lunge for the last avocado in Waitrose.
So what possessed a middle- aged Richmond woman to hurl a bag of dog excrement over her neighbour’s fence, not once but twice, this July?
Both times she was caught on CCTV and, when the case came to court last month, she was handed a 12-month community order and ordered to pay £85 costs and an £85 victim surcharge.
What motivated her moments of madness? You would need to ask a forensic psychologist, but as the woman in question, Bibi Cotman, was a forensic psychologist, that’s no help.
Exhibit three comes from Normans Bay in East Sussex, where relations between two neighbouring couples deteriorated to the point that Sussex Police threatened one of the couples, Nigel and Sheila Jacklin, with a community protection notice if they did not stop harassing their neighbours.
There had been a history of noisy builders, verbal abuse etc between the warring couples. But the community protection notice, with which the Jacklins were threatened, was so comically draconian that it would bar them from even looking at their neighbours’ house. It was so daft you couldn’t make it up.
Two other candidates for Grumpy Neighbour of the Year deserve a mention. To be fair to Richard Evans of Westonsuper-Mare, Somerset, he waited 30 years before flipping his lid and, when he did flip it, he did so with a modicum of restraint.
His gripe was the increasingly oppressive smell of garlic from the next- door restaurant, duets.
after three decades, Mr Evans had enough garlic in his nostrils to drive a saint mad and put up a sign in his window reading ‘The extractor fan has been polluting my outside space for years. I’m sick of it!’ Hardly inflammatory.
No such mitigation can be pleaded for retired engineer Stephen Gee of Puxey, dorset, who was so exasperated by the sound of children playing in the swimming pool in the next-door garden that, in 2016, he took matters into his own hands.
His daring nocturnal raid — in which he scaled the garden fence, armed with a bladed weapon, and cut a hole in the pool, from which 4,000 litres of water gushed out — was caught on CCTV, and Mr Gee ended up in court this summer. maGISTRaTES
in Poole fined him £500 and made him pay £650 damages and £250 in compensation to his neighbour. The defendant had no previous convictions.
That is the poignant thing about these feuds: they do not stem from innate unpleasantness, but from brain-fades occasioned by spending too long in close proximity to people with different lifestyles.
There are good neighbours throughout Britain. I recently came home to discover that mine had thoughtfully cleared the leaves in front of my house. We all have similar stories to tell.
But don’t let us ignore, or belittle, the evidence of increasing rancorousness in our communities. We should be savouring golden memories of the great summer of 2018, not falling out with next door.
Rock star Jimmy Page has long been a fan of the PreRaphaelites. The Led Zeppelin guitarist is reported to have said he ‘connected’ with them in his early teens, admired them from afar while at art college and has since collected several of their works.
Among these are two whopping great Arthurian tapestries by Sir Edward BurneJones, now on display in Tate Britain’s autumn show on the artist.
It’s a sumptuous exhibition and, with its rich shades, glimmering golds and backdrop of moody wall colours, it will warm you up for the winter months ahead.
Burne- Jones (1833-1898) designed stained glass, tapestry, embroidery, mosaic, illustrations and jewellery. He decorated a grand piano, the Graham Piano, with Machiavellian-looking cherubim and captured his friends in humorous pen and ink drawings. He met William Morris at oxford University and the pair became collaborators. Burne- Jones’s work for Morris & co was his bread and butter. He sketched the two of them — fat Morris reading poetry to thin BurneJones and, when Morris died, Burne- Jones described his loss as ‘the halving of my life’.
Jimmy’s tapestries were originally made for the dining room of Stanmore Hall, described as a ‘new-fangled place’ (now 23 apartments) in Middlesex. The tapestries took four years to weave and Burne- Jones was paid £1,000 as the principal designer. A princely sum for the time. Though Burne- Jones wished, simply, ‘to work and work and make a lovely world and to ask for no wages’.
The opulence of his vision fits the tone this winter. No we might not all be swagging our walls with tapestries — though they make wonderful draught excluders — but you get the idea. Victoriana is the order of the day. our rooms are no longer shy and retiring.
colours are bold for our winter coats and our walls. In the exhibition they have been painted maroon (Dulux Abacus Bead), aubergine (Fired Earth carragheen) and dark blue (Farrow & Ball’s Hague Blue, matched by Dulux). Yes, the Tate colour matches, too.
The founder of online interiors boutique Plum chutney, Anita Mackenzie, has painted her own home in deep shades of blue and green, plumchutney.com.
‘It has been a revelation,’ she says. ‘Art, plants, lighting, honey coloured woods and anything textured stands out beautifully against them. Having grown up in India, I am naturally drawn to intense, saturated colours. our artwork and accessories in rich aquamarines, oranges and intense pinks make a statement against a dark backdrop.’
Gold and metallic flourishes continue to be popular. They add drama, just as Burne- Jones found when he started painting in gold on inky paper.
MAckENZIEhas added a gold art deco pattern using washi tape onto a dark green wall in her bedroom to striking effect. of course, there are plenty of glinty accessories. Graham & Green’s concrete and brass table lamp is a subtle nod, £129, while their Midas brass chest of drawers (£995) is a decadent flourish, grahamandgreen.co.uk.
Few of us live in baronial splendour, but tapestry has, ‘ become more popular’, according to interior designer Henriette von Stockhausen of VSP interiors.
‘It is often combined with modern elements or used to cleverly upholster a key piece in a special room’, she says. ‘one company I use is Zardi & Zardi ( zardiandzardi. co. uk) which makes wallpapers and fabrics out of historic tapestries. These look amazing lining rooms and can even be printed on linen, silk or canvas for a different effect. They warm up a room and add interest to an otherwise plain wall,’ she says. If you are living in grandeur, then Julia Boston sells antique tapestries, though you won’t get much
change out of £10,000, julia boston.com. other designers are using stitching and embroidery in a more modern context. Designer claire coles creates bespoke wall coverings using machine stitching, silk and leather. one of her works, Norfolk Woods, on a gold backdrop, was inspired by the Devonshire hunting tapestries at the Victoria & Albert Museum. ‘Instead of the canvas being filled with imagery, the woodland creatures stand out and the space between them is intertwined with creeping foliage,’ says coles. ‘Having texture on the walls adds warmth and softness to a space. ‘I’m regularly asked to add colours and pattern which work in harmony with other soft furnishings.’ If you’d like a flick of stitching, then look to Fine cell Work. Its new collection features bold patterns by British designer cressida Bell. The cushions with handembroidered details are expensive, but you will be supporting the charity which helps prisoners (cressida Bell’s Granadilla needlepoint cushion is £115, finecell work.co.uk).