Looking through windows is one of the pleasures of city life

Why is it so hard to muster sympathy for the residents of Neo Bankside? Partly, of course, because everyone hates luxury flats and those who dwell in them.

This particular glass and steel protrusion was built in 2015, close to Tate Modern’s new extension. A year later the Tate opened a tenthfloor viewing platform, from which it is possible (irresistible) to look directly through the fashionable floor-to-ceiling windows of the Neo Bankside apartments.

Lindsay Urquhart, who lives on the 13th floor, says her life has been made a misery by the lack of privacy, the people waving and even taking photographs. Once, when she was walking around the Tate, she overheard another visitor saying that “the rich b–––––––” who lived in the flats deserved the intrusion.

Even the law is unsympathetic. The Court of Appeal ruled this week against the residents who have been fighting to get their side of the Tate viewing platform closed off. The judges concluded that there is no right in English law not to be overlooked from another property.

How could there be? Every city in Britain would have to be razed to the ground if it became illegal to overlook another person’s home. Indeed, one of the chief pleasures of urban living is how much opportunity it affords for spying on the neighbours.

My father and I used to love walking around our suburban neighbourhood at dusk – that transitional moment when people have turned on their lights but not yet drawn the curtains. This is when you get to see the lives of others most clearly, their windows lit up from within like TV screens. There they are, stirring meditatively at the stove, or chewing a pencil at the kitchen table, or shouting mutely at the kids. Look at their hideous wallpaper!

Look how tidy the place is, or how harsh the lighting, or how many books they have, or how few. Look at all these humans, unknown to us yet with lives as complex and mundane as our own.

Activities that would be paralysingly boring to watch close up become fascinating through a pane of glass. Staying in New York once, I found I had a perfect view of a couple watching television in the apartment opposite. Occasionally one would hold out a wine glass for the other to top up, but otherwise they remained supine. I watched them doing nothing for hours. Their unselfconsciousness made it enthralling.

Back in London, there’s a woman across the road who does a DVD exercise regime every morning. Her silent calisthenics are vastly more entertaining to watch from my bedroom window than they would be in the gym. With every squat she disappears from view, her ponytail flipping behind her, only to spring back up like a showgirl bursting from a cake.

If we were in the same room, I wouldn’t dream of watching her like this. Propriety demands that people – especially strangers – don’t stare at each other. Instead, we adopt a shifting gaze, glancing at each other sideways as we navigate the public space. This is what the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman called “civil inattention”: a deliberate pretence of disinterest, which enables strangers to coexist comfortably at close quarters.

But a window – flimsy and translucent as it is – creates just enough distance for us to hold our gaze. Putting giant windows opposite the world’s most visited modern art gallery; well, that’s just an invitation to look.