HOW WELL do you know your neighbour? Enough to lend them a lawnmower? To let them look after your child? Or do you get on so well that you would trust them with painting your front door? A Channel 4 makeover series presented by Sarah Beeny will explore how ganging together to tidy up a drab and rundown street can turn it into something like Wisteria Lane, only without all those desperate housewives, and boost the value of everyone’s home.

Streets Ahead, which starts at 8pm on Tuesday, features Norfolk Road in Walthamstow, East London. The 13 houses in the Victorian terrace were as diverse on the outside as the residents, who are Turkish, Swedish, Venezuelan and English. Some were pebbledashed, some traditional, and one horrifically modernised in the Seventies. Beeny wanted to take the street back to the way it looked in 1897, only without the smog.

In every street there will always be some people who are more enthusiastic than others, particularly if there are TV cameras about. Tony Ibrahim, who lives at No 9 with his wife Tracey, is a dynamo. He has lived in the street for seven years and has gutted and extended the inside of his house but never considered doing up the outside, let alone persuading his neighbours to do the same. But when the TV production company got in contact, he talked everyone round and a meeting was held with Beeny, a project manager and the council. It was then that they realised the power of group action — and television. One of the problems with the street is that it is narrow and if cars were parked opposite each other there would not be room for emergency vehicles. “It was a worry and for five years we had been trying to get the council to allow us to park up on the kerb,” Ibrahim says. “But suddenly, when the cameras were on them, the council budged.”

The budget for the street was £800 a house and the neighbours would have to do all the painting and bricklaying themselves. Beeny’s plan was for a uniform Victorian look, with a brick wall running outside the front of all the houses. But the residents ignored her suggestion to use old yellow London bricks in favour of cheaper new red ones. Once the wall was built, it looked horrid, so they had to tear the wall down and start again with older bricks.

Also, the owners of the three pebbledashed houses wanted something different. “I didn’t want us all to look the same, like some council estate,” Michael Fitchew, an opera singer who has lived for 20 years at No 6 with his partner Bill, a lecturer, says. He and his immediate neighbours wanted white picket fencing and to paint the pebbledash in bright colours. Again, they ignored Beeny’s suggestion for dark period colours — “We didn’t want the street to look like a museum,” Fitchew says — and went for a bright pink. Their neighbours on one side chose yellow, but they couldn’t persuade the other neighbour to go for brown to complete a Neapolitan ice-cream design; they picked Cornish cream instead. Fitchew completed the cottage look by planting honeysuckle, lavender, rosemary and a holly tree in the front.

The most important thing about the project was the way it built relationships. “I didn’t realise that I would enjoy meeting the neighbours so much,” Fitchew says. “Anonymity is a great thing about living in London — I had never even seen some people in the street. But the project brought out a real Blitz spirit.” It also caused arguments, particularly when Tony dug up the Victorian tiles in his front yard that his wife had wanted kept. Her mood was not improved when a neighbour whom she loathed found the same tiles under concrete in their yard. “I would rather Jack the Ripper had the tiles than them,” she says. Nonetheless, the project paid off: although it went grossly over budget — each house cost £1,200 in the end — a valuation of the street reckoned that the houses were each worth £20,000 more than when they started. After cleaning up one rotten neighbourhood faster than Batman, how long can it be before Beeny takes on a whole town?

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