I wrote this on the train back down to London having spent a few days up in Bradford with my family.

This is a follow-on piece to my original Stories from My Neighbours: The London Edition, where I moaned about the lamentable state of neighbourly interaction in the South.

The North is, however, a very different story, and this weekend was a prime example of that.

The Sad Stories - Funerals and Times of Need

I got home late on Sunday morning, and later that evening, a lady who lived a few doors up passed away. She’d lived a remarkable life to 105 and was surrounded by her family in her final moments. An ambulance arrived shortly afterwards and upon seeing this, a number of neighbours went over to check in on them and give them comfort in their hour of need.

I went to the funeral yesterday (people are buried as soon as practically possible in Islamic culture), and it was an excellent show of community spirit, with hundreds of people from nearby streets coming to pay their final respects. Later that evening was another funeral for another elderly lady who had died overnight, and who used to live one street over from us in our old house. I went to this funeral too, and again it was full of people from the area who had come to see the family and pay their respects.

Now, two deaths and funerals in on the same day are fairly exceptional, but it demonstrates a clear connection to one’s neighbour that I suspect I would not have, and indeed to date have not had, with my neighbours in London.

There was actually an ancient tradition in Pakistani culture that if someone in the area had a funeral, nobody would light the fires to cook dinner lest it offended the grieving family and neighbours from further afield would come together to bring you food.

I remember when my own grandfather died, we didn’t have to cook, as food kept materialising from neighbours and family members. It was an incredible level of kindness.

Another example that springs to mind is one from maybe six or seven years ago, when around dinner time one evening, we heard someone screaming in the street. A lady from across the road was frantically screaming and going from house to house, seemingly looking for help. Almost instantly, about a dozen people went out to help, quickly organising and realising that she was screaming for her infant child, who’d fainted whilst she’d been bathing him.

Within a few minutes, people were administering first aid, an ambulance was on the way, and others were comforting the understandably distressed mother. The baby was okay in the end.

The Happier Stories - Simon and The Revolving Door

We’ve mostly had fairly positive relationships with our neighbours. I remember living next to an elderly couple when I was particularly young, maybe four or five. I spent a lot of time talking to the old man, who might’ve been called Simon, especially whilst he cleaned his car or I cut the hedges (it wasn’t a very tall hedge).

They were incredibly kind and were regularly round for tea and cake. There was one evening when our fire alarm started going off and just wouldn’t stop. Now if that happened to my neighbours today, I suspect I’d just get frustrated but ultimately ignore it once I’d established that there was no fire.

Not Simon though, he came over with his tool box and sat with my dad for what felt like at least an hour until they’d managed to turn it off once and for all.

When they moved, the house sat empty for a few years until a single mother moved in, who again got on very well with my mother and was always round. This wasn’t unusual when I was young - there would always be people from the street over, and our front door was always open to visitors. This was particularly true for the families of the boys I played in the backstreet with.

The Other Neighbours

The other side of the house had more testing neighbours, who would have parties quite late into the evening, which was particularly annoying for child Rahim who’s bed was against the wall on that side of the house. Many a word were had, and it’s probably fair to say that they were nightmare neighbours, but there was interaction nonetheless!

The next people to move into that house was a young family of refugees from Syria. Both the mother and father had been highly educated in Syria but their degrees weren’t accepted here and so they were studying at Bradford University to begin to rebuild their lives.

When they first moved in, they didn’t have any internet and came to ask if they could use ours. But rather than just ask, they knocked and asked if my parents wanted to go round for coffee one afternoon. They made my parents coffee (who were much more accustomed to tea, and so coffee, particularly Arabic coffee, was literally a real eye-opener to them) and explained their stories before asking whether they wouldn’t mind helping them with their predicament until their new internet was set up a few days later.

They didn’t need to do that, but it was a very nice thing to do, and began a relationship that was very warm for as long as they lived next to us.

Further Down - Another Revolving Door

My grandparents house, where I lived for the first year of my time on this earth, was at the bottom of the next street over, and they had even deeper relationships with their neighbours. The people from the houses up to three or four doors up were always in and out of what was almost literally a revolving door.

In fact, I remember sitting in their living room many a time when a random person that I’d never seen before would just walk in to speak to my grandparents. They always welcomed them in, and there was always food, tea and juice to aid the discussion (which made it a particularly favourite place for little me to visit most days).

Even further up that street, lived a family that had initially moved here from Poland sometime after the war. The man there was called Michael and he was a real force of personality. He’d always be around, and whenever there was a bit of trouble (which wasn’t uncommon), he’d always do his bit - it helped that he was six foot. He would talk to anyone, and even though I was young for much of the time I knew him, he had incredible relationships with those around him.

And So - A Realisation

Now it would be impossible to encompass all the stories I have about my Northern neighbours in one note, a function of a) much more interaction and b) many more years spent in Northern climes.

Instead, I’ve picked a few tales from throughout the years to give you a sense of the environment and the relationships you develop with your neighbours in the North.

But in writing these two pieces, I wonder whether these are geographical differences, or differences in lives.

I grew up in an area of young families and the elderly, who all had significant proportion of people who were always home. Time also plays a factor - I grew up in a place where my family have lived for over 50 years, and this comes with generational relationships that are inherently going to be deeper.

These are also the best stories from 21 years of living in the North, and so I’m naturally going to have more stories (and more extreme stories, such as the lady who’s kid collapsed).

By contrast, I now live in a very mixed area with young families and professionals, but am myself very rarely home. I’ve moved every year I’ve been here, and have only really lived in London for two full years. And so perhaps it is unreasonable to expect to have built the relationships with my Southern neighbours that I have grown to expect in the North.

I expect the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, but I can’t say it’s immediately obvious to me. What do you think? Send me a note with your two pence.