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Tell me about the worst neighbour you’ve ever had

147 replies

Powerto · 11/12/2025 13:12

I’ve been generally lucky with neighbours.

The ones I have now are the worst though (not a nightmare thankfully) …. Did a full renovation that went late into the night for over a year and their builders hid waste in my bins, left their empty water bottle littering my driveway, the neighbours themselves have thrown stuff over their fence into my garden.

I can tolerate them now due to their renovation being over but ultimately they are very petty people.

OP posts:
Bananaandmangosmoothie · 12/12/2025 08:04

A very creepy man who would just stare over the garden fence into the kitchen window at me the whole time, then complained when we put a higher fence up. Aggressive and yelling and any guests who came to visit. Parked in anyone’s parking space that he wanted to.

Turned out he’d done it to the previous tenants as well and that’s why they moved.

Bananaandmangosmoothie · 12/12/2025 08:05

ChristmasinBrighton · 11/12/2025 14:39

Yeah I would say the convicted paedophile was probably the worst…

God I would be so tempted to daub PAEDO on his wall.

Bananaandmangosmoothie · 12/12/2025 08:06

Powerto · 11/12/2025 14:32

Not the point but how is your neighbour decrepit if they have a child?

Assuming said child was infact a child.

I read that as the child of a different neighbour from the street?

winterbluess · 12/12/2025 08:09

Mine upstairs neighbours when I lived in a flat were drug addicts. Used to hear them arguing about how the mans child had been over and found used needles under the bed. Then loud arguments with screaming and throwing crockery at each other 🫣

SedentaryCat · 12/12/2025 08:25

The ones who turned out to be racists. That was a surprise as they seemed perfectly reasonable until an African family moved in to the street.

The same ones who's adult child is involved with drug dealers - drop off and pick up.

Funnily enough, the same ones are victimising a disabled neighbour.

The rest of the street are just fine.

Paganpentacle · 12/12/2025 09:45

LittleGreenDuck · 11/12/2025 19:24

Compared to the other examples on here, this is quite endearing. At least it wasn't her pants.

Indeed.
Although looking at what some people have had to contend with I'd be rather happy to see her knickers flapping in the breeze

honeylulu · 12/12/2025 09:47

When I moved in to my first (purchased) home I realised the flat opposite was occupied by heroin addicts. They were council tenants via a private landlord. Not too subtle about their habits as would knock on my door and ask to "borrow some tin foil for cooking" or a candle to go outside and look for their nonexistent cat. Lots of dodgy folk coming and going, had to step over one passed out in the hallway once. I was worried about reporting to the police or council as we were the only 2 flats on that corridor so they would have known it was me. I was quite young, 23, and a bit clueless about what to do.

I was scared every time I went to work thinking my flat would be broken into. Once the bloke was smoking outside and asked why my boyfriend and I had a car each (to get to work!) He said we were "lucky" and asked if we would give one of them to him!

Not long after that there was some sort of explosion in their flat. Not gas (there wasn't any) but all the dodgy people went pelting out and disappeared. Tenant never returned thank god and later a much nicer one, a single dad with kids, moved in. A couple of weeks after the explosion there was a card through the door from Thames Valley Police asking if we knew the whereabouts of the departing tenant so wonder what else we didn't know.

In our current house neighbour 2 doors down started pestering us to lend her large amounts of money (£5k, then £3k, then "just" £2k). I think their business suffered massively in covid so I wasn't unsympathetic but we have 2 kids so if we have spare cash it's for their future not random neighbours. She also swore me to secrecy not to tell anyone else and that she had confided in me only as a "dear friend". We got on ok but we were not dear friends so I was rather cynical and kept saying no. I got really cross with her in the end and she avoided me after that.

Sure enough they did a moonlight flit last year having sold their house quietly to a debt factoring company and it came out that several mugs fellow neighbours had indeed lent them large amounts of money, having been spun the same story.

Actually mine seem really mild compared to some on here.

dick27 · 12/12/2025 10:48

This is not dissimilar to mine

Rocknrollstar · 12/12/2025 10:56

We have only ever had lovely neighbours. We all get on and help each other out. We have been in our house a very long time and there used to be a lot of too-ing and fro-ing between each other’s houses and late night parties.

notwittywithusernames · 12/12/2025 12:50

Couldn't use my car until police/forensics had finished doing all the blood spatter work/evidence for an attempted murder.

Then another neighbour having a fight with her affair partner and lobbing a wooden patio chair at him and smashing his teeth out. Different homes.

Glad i now live with just my daughter and neighbours either side are mostly delightful, some raucous summer parties by one side with dreadful taste in music but that's just me.

Oh forget the neighbour in the communal garden (small block of flats) that stole my underwear that was discreetly hidden on the inside of the rotary dryer. Even took my pegs

user1471538283 · 12/12/2025 14:33

I had 2 one each side. The attached side was a cokehead who used to scream at one of her many boyfriends/clients from 3am until 10am twice a week. She used to have underage boys over for sex and drugs. Despite losing her daughter and being arrested she never changed.

The other side played very loud music outside 10 hours a day that whole summer of the pandemic whilst I tried to work. They had parties, lots of shouting, a hot tub, stole my recycling bin and just wouldn't be reasonable.

I was working on 3 hours sleep most nights.

Both sides hated anyone else making any kind of noise like mowing the grass.

I moved after 17 months with my mental health in tatters.

CrazyCatLady13 · 12/12/2025 17:01

We had our windows smashed repeatedly by next door, they were related to the out of hours repair guy & joked with him that they'd start taking commission on his call out fee.

Our car was vandalised. They also got their kids to repeatedly kick their football against the front of our house.

The phone line was cut often enough that BT changed the wiring to come into the house higher up. It was before mobile phones.

bricks were thrown at us if we went to the corner shop.

Boston Fenside Estate, early 2000s. The locals wanted family to get the house rather than us. We lasted 18 months. The last straw was when we called the police for the latest problem, and the local teenagers rammed the police car with a burnt out car while it was outside our house.

spottybaghottyhag · 12/12/2025 17:55

Terrytheweasel · 11/12/2025 14:20

That’s awful. What are you going to do? You can’t live next to him surely.

You'd be surprised how common this is. I only discovered this about my neighbour because it was in the community newspaper. Because he hadn't physically approached any children he wasn't deemed a threat, so upon release from prison moved straight back in. I felt I couldn't let my DC into the garden anymore.

Powerto · 12/12/2025 19:02

Gettingbysomehow · 11/12/2025 16:15

He's smoking now the twat stinking my house out. I often go round there and complain and he pathetically lies and says its not him when you can see it and smell it and nobody else in our row of houses smokes. He tries to tell me he only smokes in the garden when the smoke is billowing out of the door.
I had to go round there at 5am one morning because got zero sleep from the stink and was due to do a 12 hour shift in the NHS that day.
He isnt allowed to smoke in the house but when she's away he's in there chugging away. He must think Im bloody stupid.

I used to live in a ground floor flat and my bedroom window opened on to a medium sized patio area. My two neighbours (the only ones who used it) would pull theirs chairs up to my open window (so close their heads could touch the glass if they leaned) and would have a smoke.

My bedroom stank of smoke. It was disgusting. They could have sat anywhere. They were dicks though. Used the entire maintenance fund for their ceiling (they had no one above them) and then refused to allow us to use any of the budget to paint the inner corridor - probably because they didn’t use it.

OP posts:
Coffeeismyfriend1 · 12/12/2025 20:52

We had one bloke who complained to our estate agent (we were renting) that we left our bins outside the garage and not inside it. Apparently it was on the deeds to the houses that you couldn’t leave them out of the garage. We told the estate agent to go back to him and ask why all the neighbours had them in the same place as us. We never heard from them again! He also used to claim the kids hanging around had come from miles away simply to hang out in the archway under our apartment. It was at the top of a hill on a very quiet road on the edge of town but apparently all the kids in town thought it was a super place to hang out and they absolutely were not the kids of our neighbours!! He was in his 60’s and moved to a brand new four bedroom house on an estate of 4 and 5 bedroom houses - I’m not sure who he thought his neighbours would be except for families with children!

The last ones at our current house used to let their kid run wild, he’d hang over our fence talking to us when we sat having a drink at 9pm on a summer night. The dad stood by their back gate smoking weed and we had a newborn baby and a pre-Schiller, it was really hot summer and we couldn’t open the back door as the smell wafted in. We’d hear them shouting and screaming. We had no idea they were moving out and they just hoped and left one day. A lovely family moved in though so it worked out ok in the end.

TwoLeftSocksWithHoles · 14/12/2025 07:59

13RidgmontRoad · 11/12/2025 15:07

Nothing like these! A very religious lady with a sign out saying CHRIST IS THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSEHOLD who absolutely hates us and we can't understand why as we've barely spoken. Very funny about parking. Occasionally rants about things in my general direction. A lot of glaring.

Thank god we're detached.

I hope that your username is not your actual address, because it seems that the lady who hates you has a direct link to God...😱

13RidgmontRoad · 14/12/2025 08:04

TwoLeftSocksWithHoles · 14/12/2025 07:59

I hope that your username is not your actual address, because it seems that the lady who hates you has a direct link to God...😱

Thankfully not Grin

EvolvedAlready · 11/01/2026 21:19

Oh too late to start this!

We have a suspected paedo.
ticks all the boxes in terms of pattern. But we live in a very polite area and even though awareness is out there, people still engage with him and let their kids play with his while he helicopters their children during play… gets quite tactile.

He doesn’t get near our kids, we’ve told him to back off…. he loved the attention and still watches them.
nothing can be done until he actually does something.

StCuntyMcCunterson · 12/01/2026 22:10

EvolvedAlready · 11/01/2026 21:19

Oh too late to start this!

We have a suspected paedo.
ticks all the boxes in terms of pattern. But we live in a very polite area and even though awareness is out there, people still engage with him and let their kids play with his while he helicopters their children during play… gets quite tactile.

He doesn’t get near our kids, we’ve told him to back off…. he loved the attention and still watches them.
nothing can be done until he actually does something.

How do you know he hasn’t already?

Echobelly · 12/01/2026 22:25

Upstairs flat- they were the freeholders of two other flats in the building - we wanted to take out a wall (with structural engineer plan, fully insured etc) among some other works. Well, husband was determined to take out the wall, I didn't want to, but that's a whole other thread. Told upstairs neighbours what we wanted to do, they said 'OK, fine, we'll just need to cross some i's and dot some t's' and we said we'd share all emails, plans etc.

Got started and the demands started coming - that the builders agree to take on a liability for the structural engineer's plans, that we do this, do that, produce a full-grown unicorn for their inspection. Freeholders are not supposed to 'unreasonably withold' permission for works and we were clear everything we were doing was insured and done by qualified people.

They eventually send us a 'cease and desist' notice for the building works when we were without a kitchen. DH rebuffs it with the fact the lease states the dwelling cannot be left uninhabitable, which is is without a kitchen and we carry on, but in the end we drop the knock through (I'm kind of relieved about that)

Oh, did I mention I was also nearly 7 months pregnant at the time?

After this, they handed us a large bill for their lawyer's fees. I paid it some time later before we sold so we could settle the dispute before going to market.

The funny thing was we sold the flat eventually to a guy who was a property developer buying it for a relative. He wanted to, and indeed did, carry out a far bigger building project on it than we planned, which upstairs must have hated, but presumably he had better lawyers and was bullish enough to stand up to them. That was quite a nice bit of karma (NB, we didn't know he'd do that when we sold to him)

EvolvedAlready · 12/01/2026 22:38

StCuntyMcCunterson · 12/01/2026 22:10

How do you know he hasn’t already?

Well nobody has reported him (I’ve checked)

BassBug · 04/04/2026 19:20

Powerto · 11/12/2025 13:12

I’ve been generally lucky with neighbours.

The ones I have now are the worst though (not a nightmare thankfully) …. Did a full renovation that went late into the night for over a year and their builders hid waste in my bins, left their empty water bottle littering my driveway, the neighbours themselves have thrown stuff over their fence into my garden.

I can tolerate them now due to their renovation being over but ultimately they are very petty people.

We once lived next to a paranoid schizophrenic who was trying to get into our loft space and who used to scream abuse all day and night. Eventually the housing went round and ran straight back out and threw up everywhere. It was wall to wall feces and bottles of piss everywhere and thousands of razor blades

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