Claire Black: Too close for comfort? Exploring the Scots’ neighbourly tendencies

We may yearn for more peace and privacy, but a new book suggests Scots are better neighbours at heart because of our social history, writes Claire Black

YOU’VE got them. I’ve got them. Leviticus told us to love them, but the Commandments insisted not too much. Neighbours. Can’t live with them, seldom (if ever) live without them.

Since houses became relatively permanent in the 14th century, learning how to put up with the people who live close to us has been a part of life. Neighbours from hell might be the cliché, but it’s too blunt and broad to capture the subtleties that shape our relationships with the people who live above and below, through the wall, across the driveway or over the fence.

They can be lifesavers, or midnight mischief makers, curtain twitchers or faceless entities known to us only through the click-clack of high heels or the slam of a door. We might not know their names but our sense of success is, for some of us at least, built on doing better than them.

But what defines a good neighbour? And how has our idea of what neighbours are for changed over the centuries?

For Emily Cockayne, author of Cheek By Jowl: A History Of Neighbours, which purports to trace the story of neighbours through nine centuries, our expectation and understanding of what it means to be neighbourly have changed as we have come to need things from them less and want privacy more. But still some things remain the same.

“We tend to think our day and age is quite particular,” she says, “but it’s funny how many cases I came across where people would say ‘neighbours aren’t the same as they used to be’ and this would be in 1659. It really is just something that people have always said.”

In medieval times, a “nigh-bour” was the person scratching a living from the chunk of land next to yours. In the 16th century it meant someone well-known, but by the 18th century it referred only to what Cockayne calls those who live in “residential propinquity”. And that’s still, pretty much, how we define it. We may see them only infrequently and know very little about them as our lives have moved indoors and centre less on local communities; domestic appliances have ensured the former and the demise of the local pub and the local corner shop haven’t helped the latter. And yet, our neighbours still have a huge impact on our lives, particularly if they have a fondness for drum and bass or a karaoke machine in the living room.

When I was born, my family lived in a council flat. We knew almost all of the neighbours. We smelled their chip pans and heard their rows and celebrations, their slammed doors and Saturday night shenanigans. When I was four, we moved to a terraced house. Rather fittingly, in line with my parents’ aspirational tendencies, it was an end terrace, so conceivably could be described as semi-detached. Right to Buy was duly exercised and the next move was made. If we’d been living in an English city rather than a Scottish one, the chances are we’d have moved to a non-council semi, a bungalow or a Victorian villa, a house where our rising status could be asserted through the increasing distance between us and those who lived closest to us. But this was Edinburgh and, just as had been the case in the 18th and 19th centuries when the upwardly mobile were leaving the mixed stairs of the Old Town, where different classes lived in close proximity, the preference was for a New Town flat.

And so, at 16, I moved to a second-floor flat in Canonmills. Not quite Scotland Street, I grant you, but with a view of it just across a small park it was as close to the Georgian grandeur as we could get. As such, it seems, I’m a symptom of a very Scottish take on neighbourliness.

“Living in tenements was always embraced by the Scottish in a very continental way – in a way that the English just refused to do,” says Cockayne, adding that when tenements were tried out as a form of housing in England it made dwellers “grumpy and angry”. As to why, Cockayne is tentative.

“It could suggest [Scots’] personality is such that they’re more likely to get on with neighbours,” she says. “Perhaps they’re more likely to find that kind of living easier because they are less privatised, less nuclear.”

It could also be, of course, that we simply had less choice. In the Census of 1861 the true squalor of much of Scotland’s urban housing was revealed. Nearly three-quarters of Scottish homes consisted of not more than two rooms and housed two-thirds of the population.

Dr Trevor Griffiths of the University of Edinburgh argues that the building of flats in Scotland had more to do with availability of building land than anything else and once it was established, people simply got used to it. “If that’s your expectation and if it’s what you’re used to then you will be more accepting of it,” he says. “It’s certainly true to say that the English have always found living in flats less than comfortable. If an Englishman’s home is his castle then he’ll hold on to that idea of space and then resent any intrusion.”

Space is one thing, but that’s not the only type of neighbourly contact that was once seen as helpful and might now be regarded as interfering. In the centuries before the welfare state, improved maternity services and the control of fire services by local authorities, it might well have been neighbours who’d pop in with a meal, or help during a home birth or do their best to douse the flames. As consumerism has taken hold and incomes – and levels of debt – have risen, we’ve stopped borrowing things from each other and expect to own what we need. How else can we explain why you’ll find a strimmer, a hedge-cutter and a lawnmower in most sheds up and down the land even though it would make much more sense to share them?

For Cockayne this goes some way to explaining the paradox between the fact that although home ownership means that we’re all desperate to keep where we live as nice as we can – something better achieved through working with our neighbours – our “private materialism” gets the better of us.

“We have so much choice now that we don’t always make the best of our neighbour relations because we don’t have to. We can get on with our lives without having any involvement in them at all. It’s also why we tend to find our neighbours more of a nuisance because sometimes that is all we know of them. In the past they were probably just as big a nuisance, but we also knew they’d look after our kids and do all sorts of things for us. We’ve kept a lot of the negative and lost a lot of the positive.”

Has this happened to the same extent in Scotland? Could it be that the particular way at least some of us live here – in tenements in the cities and in often remote rural communities beyond – feeds into what might still be seen as a greater sense of shared community and empathy with each other that plays out in our politics and culture?

Accepting or rejecting that proposition, it’s true to say that although we might bemoan the fact that we know our neighbours less, few of us would want to go back to the kind of hardship and lack of privacy that made close ties with the folk next door or across the landing a necessity. And really, is it such a bad thing that we don’t know the people who happen to live close to us?

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Griffiths. “Knowing your neighbours and knowing about them means that they also know about you. Neighbours can be a source of support but they can also be a kind of imposition.”

Social class has always played a part in neighbourly relations and despite the huge changes that have impacted upon how we live, it’s an aspect that’s hardly changed. If you’re wealthy your neighbours probably live at a reasonable distance from you and you need come into contact with them only when you want to. If you live in poverty, you may well have to put up with closer contact than you find comfortable. “Distant cordiality” is what most of us are after – take the odd parcel in for me, but don’t imagine that we’re going to be friends.

Even those who maintain distantly cordial relations still want to know that (distantly and cordially, of course) they are doing better than the folk next door. It might once have been about who had the first TV (the outdoor aerial was your visible sign of affluence) or the biggest conservatory, but according to Cockayne, there’s a new competitive arena: eco-credentials. Who does most recycling? Who uses their cars less? Who uses reusable shopping bags and gets on their bike most often? We might see them less and know them even less than that, but neighbours are still the people we want to impress because they’re the ones who see us in our natural habitat, where we’re most ourselves.

Polling by YouGov in 2010 showed that nearly half of those asked thought that they knew more about the daily activities of their favourite celebrity than about their neighbours. Most of that information probably came from the internet. But as to whether the Facebook Wall can become the new garden fence, both Cockayne and Griffiths are sceptical. The only way this can work is when enough of the people who are most isolated and in need of neighbours – typically older people or those who live in poverty – are connected. And even then, virtual connections are unlikely to take us back to the halcyon days of old, whatever we might imagine they were.

“Neighbourliness has evolved along with society and we’ve developed our own rules depending on what the needs of the time are,” says Griffiths. “But as for the desire for greater privacy, it’s difficult to see how you can reverse that, get back to whatever there was before. The big society? That’s asking for rather a lot I sus « pect.” «

Cheek by Jowl: A History Of Neighbours by Emily Cockayne is published on Thursday by Bodley Head, priced £20