When I moved house this spring, I was immediately charmed by the community of my new road. We had not one but two WhatsApp groups – one for chatting, one for emergencies – in which people let each other know they’d taken in their parcels, shared local events like craft workshops, and in one instance even offered to donate blood to one neighbour’s family friend, who was in desperate need of a transfusion. It was, it seemed, the best of humanity, until helpfulness gave way to hatred; residents started to bicker about parking, made noise complaints, and even dubbed one disliked man a terrorist.

As Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared in his 1944 play No Exit: Hell is other people – and living alongside those you haven’t picked can prove a test for the body and the mind. In Olivia Wilde’s film The Invite, which hit cinemas this month, the director stars as one half of a San Francisco couple on the brink of a breakup, who invite their free-spirited neighbours (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) over for dinner. As Wilde buys flowers and makes soufflé, her husband (Seth Rogen) complains bitterly about the intrusion: He hates this couple who have loud sex and make strange small talk in the lift.

Although half of Britons said in a Nextdoor survey that they’d turned to their neighbours for help in the past year, one in 10 people happily admitted to researchers for GoCompare that they don’t actually like their fellow residents, with those in the South East most likely to have a problem with next door. In The Invite the two couples’ feud plays out for comedic effect: the gift of a homemade flan, followed by an attempt at swinging. In real life, cross-resident resolution is rarely so candied and curious.

“I extremely and aggressively hate my neighbours,” says 29-year-old Paige, who lives in a house with her friends in south London. The feud began when a woman next door asked them not to turn their outdoor lights on past 8pm, because the light shone into her daughter’s room, who hadn’t managed to pick out curtains that she liked. “We told her that lights are meant to go on at night and that obviously didn’t go down well,” says Paige. Weeks later, the woman started construction on a conservatory that launched each day at 7.45am and coated their garden in inches of brick dust. “Our entire house, all of our garden furniture, all of our windows, are filthy,” says Paige. “We f****g hate her for it.”

In Edinburgh, 32-year-old Daisy also “f****g hates” her neighbours. “One woman in the bottom flat thinks she owns the entire shared garden and believes she should be feeding pigeons, seagulls and rats to encourage diversity in the garden,” she laments. “It makes the space completely unusual and she’s unable to be reasoned with because apparently it’s a detriment to the wildlife… She says dogs aren’t welcome despite the garden being shared by 12 flats. She calls herself the “designated garden lead”, but she’s not. It’s the most mundane drama ever, but it drives me nuts.”

These types of neighbour feuds are maddening and, often, hilarious to spectate. After Paige’s neighbour’s children mistakenly threw their basketball over her fence, she was so filled with rage that she wanted to stab it with a kitchen knife. “My housemates told me I wasn’t allowed,” she mourns.

One woman in the bottom flat believes she should be feeding pigeons, seagulls and rats to encourage diversity in the garden

Other instances have markedly less comedic value. Although grown up and in her own house now, 30-year-old Joy’s* neighbour from her childhood home in Surrey has haunted her family for decades. Mean-spirited and rude, he yelled at Joy as a child for having three friends over on New Year’s Eve and, more recently, made her family’s dog sitter cry because the fire alarm was triggered during an electrical storm while she was out. “That’s a brief overview,” she says. “Relations have been frosty. Basically he’s a bully, and he’d never speak to my dad or brother like that – only children and women.”

Even more alarmingly, recent university graduate Lucy* was hounded out of her new apartment in Warwickshire after the man next door started to film, harass and verbally abuse her. “He knocked on the door and told me that he’s having a mental health crisis and he’s got heart issues,” she says. “So, I offered him a cup of tea and told him to come in. I had to tell him to leave after two hours of being hospitable – he just wasn’t taking the hint.”

What ensued was nothing short of a horror film. The neighbour would listen at the front door until the early hours to try and hear if Lucy and her partner were having sex, then open their letter box to make sure. He’d pretend he’d locked himself out of his flat just to interact, blast music night and day, and call the couple various racial slurs and mime stabbing them, until he was evicted and continued to harass them online. “It hasn’t made me scared to interact with my neighbours,” says Lucy, who came close to being placed under witness protection. “But I wish the landlord had warned us.”

We told her that lights are meant to go on at night and that obviously didn’t go down well

We are living on top of each other more than ever before. Over half of all homes in London are flats or apartments, according to the 2024 housing stock, and more than 50 per cent of homes built since 2002 are highrise flats. Go Compare found that being quiet and peaceful were the most important traits of being a good neighbour (with being friendly and chatty coming in second), but it can be increasingly difficult to embody quiet and peace in an environment that isn’t so.

Joe Painter, a human geography professor at Durham University, notes that neighbour relations can become particularly fraught, as it’s the only area of our lives – aside from family – where we can’t choose those closest to us. “At work, you can choose your company, you clock off and go home,” he says. With neighbours, whether you like it or not, they’re there when you go to sleep and wake up.

In 2023, research by King’s College London found the UK to be among the most trusting countries when it comes to neighbours, behind only Egypt, Sweden, and Norway. But that can feel hard to believe in 2026 when Facebook community groups, the road group chat – or neighbourhood apps like Nextdoor – are popping off over a missing parcel, or a misplaced recycling bin.

”They are forms of social media,” Painter concludes. “Like Twitter and Instagram, it allows people to hide behind the screen – except you know them,” he says. “So, you can certainly see why it exacerbates conflict.”

Painter posited in a paper published in 2012 that we should pay more attention to the figure of the neighbour, rather than focusing on neighbourhoods, or geographical units, for a better understanding of ethics, citizenship, and urban politics. “It brings a challenge, to live alongside people who you might not have anything in common with, or might not even like,” he says. “But I do think that’s probably a good thing for society, to address that in our personal lives, as well as our national political life.”

Unlike in families, which have their own hierarchies, rituals and traditions, there’s no system, standard or clear expectation of how to be a so-called good neighbour in modern urban societies. “It’s all about feeling our way,” says Painter, who notes we tend to stereotype our neighbours as being wonderful or the absolute opposite. “It’s always ‘a very close knit community’ or ‘neighbours from hell’,” he says. “Most of the time, it’s neither of those things. But we do become a little bit wary of our neighbours until we interact more, because there's that unknowingness and no clear codes for how to deal with people.”

The closest codes we have for strangers living among each other are reality television. Painter points to the first season of Big Brother (before it became “clickbait”) and the show that launched Ben Fogle’s career, Castaway, as useful examples that allow us to observe how we relate to one another in a confined environment. “You can imagine the research that could be done to try out different forms of neighbourhood living, neighbourliness, and different forms of neighbourhood interaction, to see what actually works,” he says. “Those social experiments would be quite interesting.”

Despite the spats, the rows and, in some cases, verbal abuse and violence (last year, a “much-loved” 74-year-old neighbour was killed by another resident in a row over shutting a gate), Painter makes clear that government policy interventions – beyond funding for local community projects – are unwise as a way to regulate interactions. “If we do that, we’ll end up in a bad place,” he says. “In the end, what it comes down to is the need for us to, somehow, work it out together – as neighbours.”