Integration and the Neighbours Who Integrated Perfectly Until You Had to Live Next Door

A friend recently told me a story that made me think rather differently about integration. It is not about a deprived inner city neighbourhood, a religious enclave or people who arrived in Britain unable to speak English. What makes it interesting is precisely the opposite.

My friend lives in a leafy, prosperous suburb on the northern edge of North London, next to Hertfordshire. And I really do mean leafy North London here, not Islington, which the press insists on calling North London. This is the other North London, large houses, good schools, expensive cars, gardens, golf clubs and the sort of place people move to when they have done reasonably well for themselves.

About 13 years ago a Nigerian family moved into the adjoining half of his semi detached house. On paper, you could hardly imagine a better example of successful integration. The wife was a deputy head teacher at a posh girls school in North London. The family was prosperous, educated and professional. Their children were roughly the same age as my friend’s and, when they arrived, my friend and his partner went round with a bottle of wine to welcome them.

Nobody needed English lessons. Nobody was socially excluded. Nobody was demanding Sharia law. These were two prosperous professional families living in an affluent English suburb. Surely, if integration happens naturally anywhere, it happens here.

Except it didn’t.

It began with noise. There was piano practice approaching midnight, loud conversations and singing after 1am and, at the other end of the night, enthusiastic prayer sessions beginning at around six in the morning. Cries of “Help me, Jesus!” would come through the wall at a volume which, as my friend puts it, ought to have removed the need for divine omniscience. Jesus could presumably hear perfectly well from wherever he happened to be.

At first my friend shrugged it off. Nobody wants to become Victor Meldrew because the neighbours occasionally make some noise. But it wasn’t occasional, and what bothered him was the apparent lack of concern that another family was trying to sleep a few feet away.

Then came the shower pump from hell. The previous neighbours converted their loft and installed a pump which, according to my friend, sounded like a jet engine starting above his bedroom. It operated at all sorts of hours. He resorted to earplugs and, in one of those consequences nobody could invent, developed an ear infection so severe that he spent around 10 days in a German hospital over Christmas and New Year.

Attempts to resolve the problem amicably went nowhere. My friend says the attitude he encountered amounted to, ‘This is my house and I can do whatever I like in it.’ His own view was simpler. Of course your house is yours, but if you share a wall with another family, you don’t play the piano at midnight or make a racket at six in the morning. You shouldn’t need legislation to tell you that.

Eventually he and his partner raised the problem more forcefully. Instead of a sensible discussion, he says he was effectively branded a Nazi and told  by his neighbour that he was “everything she had been warned about” before moving to Hertfordshire.

He was baffled. He had never regarded the dispute as racial. 

Eventually the council became involved. My friend had to keep a noise diary, officials supplied recording equipment and there were visits and letters. Public employees were now spending their time mediating something that should have been settled by two families talking to each other.

My friend was still trying to avoid an official battle. On the eve of the council sending a formal letter to the neighbours, he wrote to them again. His opening line was: “I’d still really like to be friends.”

The following day, while the two families’ cars were passing each other slowly, the husband allegedly spat through the driver’s window into my friend’s partner’s face, in front of his own children. The police were called. When they eventually spoke to him (two days later), the husband had apparently explained that he had sneezed.

My friend assures me that it was the most remarkably well aimed sneeze in Hertfordshire.

After the police visit, he says he heard the wife loudly declaring through the wall: “It’s always the same, white people are always trying to keep us down!”

Reverse the races in that sentence and nobody would have difficulty recognising it as prejudice. Nor should they. Prejudice does not cease to be prejudice because of the identity of the person expressing it.

Things deteriorated further. There were more arguments and more noise. At one point the neighbours apparently cut a tree in my friend’s front garden without permission. When he objected, the confrontation escalated until the police were called again after the husband allegedly threatened him while holding garden shears.

When my friend first told me that part, I laughed because I assumed he had embellished the story.

He hadn’t.

Now, the obvious response is that these were simply unpleasant neighbours. Britain has always produced plenty of those. One Nigerian family cannot tell us how Nigerian families behave, any more than one obnoxious English family in Benidorm tells us everything about British culture.

But I don’t think that entirely disposes of the cultural question.

What makes the story interesting is how thoroughly integrated this family appeared to be. The wife was a senior teacher at a prestigious North London school. The family was prosperous, spoke English, had children in the education system and had lived in Britain for years. On every conventional measure of integration, you would put a large tick beside their name.

Yet after more than a decade living beside them, my friend felt there remained a substantial gulf between the two households over some very basic things: how much noise it is acceptable to make, how much you modify your behaviour for a neighbour, how you deal with criticism and whether a disagreement between people of different ethnicities immediately becomes an argument about race.

That is the interesting bit, because integration is normally discussed through dramatic examples such as segregated communities, religious extremism, grooming gangs, honour violence or riots. Those are serious issues, but they make it easy to imagine that integration is a problem confined to somebody else’s neighbourhood.

My friend’s experience suggests it can fail somewhere much less obvious. It can fail among educated people, prosperous people and professional people living in expensive streets where everybody appears completely integrated.

Of course none of this proves that his neighbours behaved as they did because they were Nigerian. Perhaps they would have behaved identically had they been born in Watford. Britain produces more than enough inconsiderate idiots of its own.

But it would be equally strange to pretend that upbringing and culture have no influence on how people behave. We happily celebrate cultural differences when they involve food, music, festivals and clothing, then become terribly uncomfortable when somebody suggests culture might also influence attitudes towards noise, confrontation, authority or neighbours.

Culture apparently exists only when it is enriching. That cannot possibly be true.

Integration therefore has to mean something more than speaking English, getting a good job and buying an expensive house. At some level it means adapting to the ordinary expectations of the society in which you live, including the small courtesies that stop people from driving each other mad.

My friend’s story also came with a cost. Council officers visited, recording equipment was installed, letters were written and police officers attended allegations of assault and threats. Taxpayer funded institutions spent hours dealing with a dispute between two prosperous families who couldn’t establish a workable relationship across a party wall.

Perhaps the simplest point is that ordinary disagreements also have to remain ordinary disagreements. A white Englishman should be able to tell a Nigerian neighbour that the music is too loud without becoming a racist. A Nigerian neighbour should be able to tell a white Englishman exactly the same thing. Sometimes a complaint about noise really is just a complaint about noise.

My friend describes the whole saga as a First World problem, and perhaps it is. But after more than a decade of lost sleep, council visits, police calls, a hospital stay, accusations of racism, alleged spitting and one particularly memorable encounter involving garden shears, he no longer accepts the comforting assumption that employment, education, money and a nice postcode automatically amount to integration.

Living next door to somebody is not the same thing as integrating with them. And perhaps we should stop pretending that it is.