Loathe Thy Neighbour ; an Englishman's Castle Is Permanently Under Siege From His Neighbour's Craze for Rebuilding His Home, Installing Wooden Floors and Throwing All-Night Barbecues. Helen Kirwan-Taylor Reports From the Home Front of an Uncivil War

Evening Standard - London › January 12, 2007

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Summary

Thor Bjorgolfsson, the Icelandic billionaire, has a penchant for fine clothes and fast cars, but he keeps his head down real low when he appears (which he seldom does) on my street.

For more than a year, as the resident journalist, I was besieged with requests to take my neighbours' complaints to the papers, the complaint being the fact that, for at least a year, the people on my street took to shouting at one another as their coffee cups vibrated in their hands. I (and I did say this to Bjorgolfsson in person) collected more than half a dozen parking tickets that year, thanks to the endless run of monstrous diggers, cranes, and building suppliers servicing his house: this meant that no neighbour could either enter or park on the street. His building supplies took up most of the pavement and several parking bays, and no amount of communal complaining, letter writing and calls to the council mattered. His neighbours, who are nice, family minded folk, talked of moving house. That's how bad things became. I know for a fact it was bad because while we had the conversation about noise, the house was shaking and a fine coat of dust settled on the table.

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Loathe Thy Neighbour ; an Englishman's Castle Is Permanently Under Siege From His Neighbour's Craze for Rebuilding His Home, Installing Wooden Floors and Throwing All-Night Barbecues. Helen Kirwan-Taylor Reports From the Home Front of an Uncivil War

Like mugging tales, everyone has a neighbour they would like to set afloat, if not alight, and, according to the research, it's getting worse.

One in ten Britons hate their neighbours according to an Ipsos MORI poll of 1,962 over-15s commissioned by the environmental charity NSCA for Noise Action Week. A third of Britons adm...

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