Many years ago I spent a cold Thursday night on a London pavement, queuing for a hard-to-let council flat on an estate in Brixton. The queue was very long, which made me wonder why these particular flats were so hard to let. The following Sunday morning, all was revealed.
About 6am, I woke suddenly in my new home to find the windows rattling to an insistent reggae beat. There was a party in a nearby flat, and somebody had just turned up the volume to better appreciate the pounding rhythms of the bass guitar player. That was in the mid-1980s, and I thought domestic life couldn’t get any noisier than those Sunday-morning recitals. Yet these days, the problem is, apparently, far, far worse.
Complaints about noisy neighbours have risen fivefold in the past 20 years. Last year there were 206,086 complaints about domestic noise, and that’s a modest assessment of the problem — those figures were collected from just two-thirds of local authorities.
In some areas, the din seems overwhelming: nearly half of all Londoners, for example, think life is too noisy. Our dogs bark, our children scream, we rev up our motorbikes at all hours, we attempt to tap dance in high-heeled shoes on the wooden floors of our upstairs flats, we have noisy sex — if we’re lucky — and, if the mood takes us, late at night we crank up the volume on our CD of The World’s Loudest Rock Anthems. Or, if we are the England football captain, we hold lavish parties to mark the beginning of the World Cup.
Guests at David and Victoria Beckham’s party in May included Wayne Rooney, P.Diddy and David Cameron. No doubt the neighbours in the Hertfordshire town of Sawbridgeworth were thrilled when proceedings kicked off with an afternoon fly-past by a Spitfire, a Lancaster and a Hurricane. They were less thrilled when the party was still going strong in the early hours. “It was two o’clock when we woke to hear what sounded like Robbie Williams performing in our back garden,” complained one.
“The noise was terrible,” said another, which seems rather harsh on Williams. “Perhaps if it was a Friday or Saturday night we would have let this pass, but it was a Sunday and — unlike many of the guests — we had work to go to the next day.”
Future parties at “Beckingham Palace” will now be monitored by the local council’s noise patrol, so neighbours will be able to sleep easy in their beds. But in some parts of the country the noise is so bad that people are moving house just to get away from it.
About half a million people have been forced to move in the past year because of noisy neighbours, says the National Society for Clean Air and Environmental Protection (NSCA). When it questioned 2,000 people about noise pollution, it discovered that 14% had been woken up by noisy neighbours, 5% had argued with their neighbours over noise, and 1% said they had been forced to move. If reflected nationally, says the NSCA, that amounts to half a million moves.
Teenagers were blamed in a quarter of cases, but they are certainly not entirely responsible. Last year, officials in Charnwood, Leicestershire, served a noise abatement order on 104-year-old Ethel Preston, whose television was so loud that one of her neighbours had to sleep in his car. Mrs Preston didn’t mean to cause any trouble: she couldn’t hear the set properly because she was so hard of hearing. After she breached the abatement order, the council offered her some headphones.
That didn’t work either. Finally, an enterprising official adjusted her volume control with the aid of a tube of glue to ensure it would not get past halfway.
Summer makes the problem worse. We hold parties in our gardens, trying to speak over the sound of aircraft coming in to land overhead. Or we throw open our windows, and so give the neighbours the full benefit of our television, radios and expensive stereo equipment.
This is why Noise Concern has chosen summer to launch a poster campaign drawing attention to the problem. Quietly, of course.
“Our research shows that millions of people are suffering every day,” says Alan Woods, the chief executive of Encams, an environmental charity behind Keep Britain Tidy, and which runs Noise Concern. “They are feeling frustrated, angry and deprived of sleep. This campaign will advise sufferers of what to do about their noise problem and make noisemakers aware of how they are ruining other people’s lives.”
Noise Concern has a helpline (01273 682 223) and a website (www.noiseconcern.org) on which sufferers plead for help. “I have extremely noisy neighbours,” says one message that has been posted. “A mother, four kids — old enough to know better — and two very noisy dogs. She vacuums at one o’clock in the morning, the kids are shouting at each other all day and night. Some nights it’s gone midnight, and they are still at it. The dogs bark whenever she leaves them. I’ve contacted my local housing association, but they weren’t any help.” In that case, Noise Concern suggests getting help from a group called Mediation UK, an umbrella association for local voluntary mediation services that specialises in resolving disputes within communities.
Some complaints are less serious but no less irritating. “The elderly couple next door have a chiming clock,” says a message from Wigan. “It chimes every 15 minutes. It wakes me every morning and can be heard in every room.”
According to environmental health officers, the best thing to do if you suffer from noisy neighbours is first to tell them — politely and tactfully — that they are making your life a misery. If you can’t settle it between yourselves, then approach your local council. If the nuisance is bad enough, it can issue a noise abatement order. Offenders who breach abatement orders can ultimately be fined £5,000, and another £500 for every day that the noise carries on after conviction. A couple of years ago, a man from Dudley, in the West Midlands, racked up fines of nearly £8,000 for persistently annoying his neighbours with loud drum’n’bass music. Under the Noise Act 1996, council officials can also seize equipment that is creating a noise nuisance.
It can be tempting to take matters into your own hands. Three years ago, a speed bump was installed outside Ian Beesley’s home in Oxfordshire. It forced cars to slow down and kept the area’s children safe when they crossed the road, but every time a lorry passed by at night the noise woke Beesley, a builder. Finally, he snapped. He climbed into his JCB and dug up the bump. “All I wanted was some sleep,” he told magistrates, who let him off with a conditional discharge.
Some noise nuisances are easily solved, but how do you ask the world’s airline industry to pipe down? More than 500,000 people are disturbed by night flying at Heathrow airport alone, says the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise. And more than 1m people are affected during the day, some at distances of 20 miles from the airport. “Many of our members live with a plane coming overhead — every 90 seconds — virtually throughout the day,” says John Stewart, the association’s chairman. It gets worse in the summer: not just because it is the holiday season, but down on the ground more people are outside enjoying the good weather. The association wants a ban on night flights, a cap on flights to and from Heathrow and a tax on transfer passengers using the airport.
You might think you can escape the noise by packing up and heading for the countryside. That’s what I did. No more early morning reggae or the squeal of passenger aircraft. Ah, wonderful — but instead we have RAF jets swooping overhead and the coastguard helicopter. And even at night it’s not as quiet as you might think. I was woken the other week by the screech of an owl near my window.
Does anybody know how to serve a noise abatement order on an owl?
Eight steps to silence
Summertime and the living is noisy. And it will stay that way until you take action. If you have a problem, try following these simple rules:
1. Pluck up the courage to ask your neighbour to stop making so much noise, explaining politely what it is doing to you and your family
2. Suggest a compromise. For example, little Johnny can bash his football against your wall for two hours, provided he stops at 9pm
3. Invite your neighbour to attend a dog training course so that they may better understand their dog’s (incessant) bark. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs offers free classes in understanding canine woofs. Peterborough city council was the first to offer it after it found that 15% of the 1,300 noise complaints to its pollution control team related to the barking of dogs
4. If you can’t work it out together, call in a third party. Contact Mediation UK, 0117 904 6661, www.mediationuk.org.uk
5. If counselling doesn’t work, then complain to your local authority’s environmental health department. Keep a diary of the noise and its levels. If the local authority thinks that it is a statutory nuisance, it can issue an abatement notice. If the noise continues, it becomes an offence and can be punishable by a fine of up to £5,000 or an Asbo
6. If you aren’t happy with the local authority or your neighbours, then you can start legal proceedings at the magistrates’ court
7. If not, move house or invest in some serious soundproofing. Contact www.noisenet.org
8. Anyone buying in London can check local noise pollution levels at www.noisemapping.org
UK Noise Association, www.ukna.org.uk. For more information, go to www.defra.gov.uk/environment/noise/suffer/
