When you live in the city, the world is full of nosy parkers. I should know because I am one. I remember my early forays up to London from the West Country on the National Express coach, coming in via the Westway as the sun was setting.
As the sky turned indigo, lights would flicker on in the flats that overlooked the dual carriageway, giving me a direct view into the lives of strangers. I would glimpse them standing at stoves, slumped on sofas, or sitting on the phone clutching a fag and a bottle of beer. These domestic scenes were, for the teenage me, fleeting urban postcards, idyllic snapshots of what my own life could be.
I was reminded of this on learning that London’s Tate Modern has won a privacy-related lawsuit brought by the owners of a block of luxury flats adjacent to the gallery, part of the hilariously named Neo Bankside development. The residents of the sparkling new £4m flats wanted to shut down the gallery’s top-floor terrace, which offers beautiful views across London, on account of the visitors who habitually gawk into their homes, sometimes using binoculars to get a better look.
I sympathise, truly I do. Looking out of your living room to find crowds goggling back at you, possibly while casting aspersions on your objets d’art, is clearly irksome. On the other hand, it takes a special kind of confidence to blow millions on a flat with a swanky glass exterior – one that is positioned a stone’s throw from one of London’s most popular tourist attractions – and subsequently try to eradicate all visible human life within a 150ft radius. Curtains would have been a more straightforward solution.
In any case, the judge, who went to the trouble of visiting the flats as well as the offending terrace at the Tate, was having none of it. Having deemed the view from the museum as “rather splendid”, he suggested that the residents simply “lower their solar blinds” or, better still, invest in some pot plants.
Alas, the well-heeled denizens of Neo Bankside don’t do indoor plants, or indeed net curtains (as suggested by the former Tate director, Nicholas Serota), or anything that might besmirch the interior perfection of their plate-glass prisons. Perhaps they’d be better suited to a gated residence in Chiswick, preferably with CCTV to scare off the riff-raff. Next time I visit the Tate I’ll be sure to take the lift to the top floor in order to give the neighbours a friendly little wave.
For ordinary mortals living in more averagely overpriced accommodation, to wish for privacy in the city is to wish for the moon on a stick. But is privacy – the kind where you are fully sealed off from human life – even desirable? It is said that a Londoner is never more than 6ft from a rat, but the distance to another person can’t be much more than that. Having been reared on a farm deep in the countryside, high-density living – indeed, the very concept of neighbours – was a novelty when I first moved to the capital. Since then I’ve lived opposite, next door to, or sandwiched between rowdy students, voluble families, mute city types, night owls, drunkards and Olympic shaggers.
To this day I can’t hear Oasis’s Wonderwall without thinking of the heartbroken neighbour who howled along to it daily for six months. And there was the time I stayed in a flat above a Greek social club in north London which was robbed at knifepoint. It turned out we were in at the time; we assumed the shouting downstairs was just another rambunctious game of cards.
Cities bring out the voyeur in us all. Edward Hopper understood this, painting solitary figures lost in thought, and viewed through panes of glass or from across the street. Paul Auster and Paula Hawkins are among the novelists to have turned people-watching into a literary event. Film directors naturally can’t resist tapping into our prurient urges: Rear Window, Disturbia and The Burbs showed how violence and subterfuge can lurk beneath the cosy domestic veneer.
More cheering was a recent scene in the TV series The Marvelous Mrs Maisel in which Abe, father of fledgling comedian Midge, looks out of his window and sees the couple in the neighbouring apartment laughing along to his daughter’s standup routine on TV. Only then does he accept her new career.
These days, given half a chance, I still gape into people’s windows and daydream about what their lives are like. The glazed apartment buildings outside London’s Victoria station are manna from heaven – all those people piled up like Lego figures in little glass boxes. This winter, I have spent a lot of time shuttling up and down the south coast where houses back on to the railway line for miles. I am, once again, transfixed by the scenes of people starting their days or winding down after work, their boilers chugging steam into the salty air.
I live in Brighton now where, working at home, I love to hear the bustle of human activity around me. I can go for hours without talking to anyone, though living in close proximity to other people holds no fear. I know when my neighbours leave the house, take the kids to school and, in the summer when the windows are open, when they sit down to dinner. I’ve no doubt they are intimately acquainted with our routine, starting with the clank of our back door helpfully announcing our dog’s early-morning bowel movement. Living cheek by jowl with strangers – people who often become friends, confidants and the first port of call in a crisis – is reassuring and enriching. It’s life happening on your doorstep.