My neighbour has built a bonfire in the garden

[Alexindisguise]

Presumably to be lit tonight. It's big, about 10ft away from the back of our semi detached houses.

Aibu to be alarmed and think no one in their right mind would do this?

They've only lived here a few weeks, so don't know them at all.

Other than be on standby with a hose pipe tonight, anything we can do?

mygrandchildren you are showing your age with that comment and how utterly ridiculous it is to quote the 'good old days' .

"as our gardens are too close together."

blame that on developers being greedy about how many homes they build on an area. There is a massive amount of land but big country landowners cannot easily turn it over for housing development since neighbours and infrastructure won't be amenable...

Where my Mum last lived, each house had a drive and a garage separate from the house. The estate I lived on had the garage built into the home and the total floor area was under 800 square feet.

Behind us on the main road, each property's garden was as wide as 1.5x the width of our gardens. Fewer and fewer homes have sensible gaps between houses (for drives) let alone reasonable size gardens (suitable for swing or slide etc).

When I was young we had a 60 ft by 30 ft garden one way and 30 ft by 30 ft the other... Then again, ours was the only house in the terrace with a side alley for the coalman not to walk through the house, so gardens were a bit wider than most...

Agree with Piggy I am in my '50's and we all used to go to a big community bonfire on our local common, they would give a firework display and we would all stick money in a bucket for Roundtable or whatever. People did not buy feckin great 'bomb' type fireworks to set off at home.

It's lit, flames are higher than the 6ft fence but seems to be ok so far.

blame that on developers being greedy about how many homes they build on an area.
It's not the developers fault!
They build homes.
The gardens are fine for being gardens..

I'm pretty sure planning new houses doesn't have a clause in it saying 'must have enough room for each household to build a bonfire of unspecified size'.

The unsafe bonfires in gardens problem is caused by thr types of idiot who think they can build a bonfire in a small garden. They are.probably also thr type to put varnished wood etc on there & other things which shouldn't be there. In other words 'me wanr fire but no nowt about it. Me pile stuff and light it to go woosh woosh.'

I am in my 50’s and yes we did have a big bonfire and fireworks in our garden for bonfire night. Still remember my dad nailing Catherine wheels to the old apple tree and eating jacket potatoes that were cooked in said bonfire.

I don't think people did have fireworks in their own gardens ' years ago'

We always had fireworks when I was young (late 60s into early 70s) and in the 80s (in Sussex, when my nephews were young) For our Mum's birthday in 1990 we had loads of fireworks including mortars, catherine wheels and other things (the rockets had 4' wood support, fired from an old drainpipe and the mortars went up 250 feet). I think I spent about 80 quid at a garden centre (it was her 70th birthday and we'd all [12 including her grandchildren] been out for a meal beforehand. We were in my sister's back garden in Leek with the fireworks at the back fence about 25 feet from her house (and firing over the tennis courts behind)

Piggy, we always had fireworks at home, but they were single things, Catherine wheels, rockets, Roman fountains etc, exciting enough for kids but not too much in a back garden, not like these mini display boxes that seem to get bought these days that would be great in a field but are really scarey in your next door neighbours terraced house garden!

I’m in my 50’s and we always had fireworks in the garden when I was a child, and bonfires. A lot of people did. Fireworks were smaller and quieter then though.

It's not the developers fault!
They build homes.
The gardens are fine for being gardens..

If the houses are so close they cannot have a drive to the side of the house, leading to a garage + shed in the back garden then they are pushing more homes into the estate.

On several estates built within the last 35 years, looking out of windows only looks onto the fronts or backs of other homes.

My Mum's home had a field behind it, so although there were lots of homes built close, she at least had some views with no other homes and just trees and low fences...

Density of housing is very high, I feel, in practically all urban areas in the UK, whether old areas (with inadequate roads for the amount of traffic nowadays) or new areas (unless the homes are running into the upper ranges (say band F, G, H and semi detached)

Sorry for the rubbish pic

In my 50s.

We always had fireworks at home in the back garden when we were kids.

Sparklers, catherine wheels, rockets lunched from milk bottles, roman candles.

Sometime we went to the village display as well.

That's pretty big!
We had bonfires as a kid but never burned furniture

I remember fireworks in our garden in the 1960s

network
Whatever your (or mine) views are on modern estates the fact is that the problem of people having unsafe bonfires isn't developers.
The problem of people having unsafe bonfires is idiots building bonfires.

If being able to build a bonfire safely means so much to people then they need to buy a house with a bigger garden.

It doesn't matter if it's a 4 bed townhouse tjat's 18 months old or a 2 up 2 down terraced miner's cottage, not having enough space for a safe bonfire should equal no bonfire.

These people who don't get this fact and build them anyway are idiots.

Your neighbour is an idiot
Hope it's burnt out and over soon

We had Fireworks in our garden in the 50s, as did most of the neighbours. It wasn't unusual at all.

Hope daily mail don't pick this thread!

Doesn't look to bad out the window, I was expecting the towering inferno from all the hype. Anticlimax?

OK, I stand corrected. It might be that it was unusual in Scotland as Halloween was always more of a thing. We definitely did not have fireworks in gardens. There was a big bonfire on some public land and a few Catherine wheels etc.

I agree that they have definitely got nosier!

Ha Noisier not nosier!!

Bit of an anti climax. I kept checking back expecting to see a something a bit more impressive.
Stop worrying op that is not massive or in anyway out of control

What do you think is going to happen? Is your house made of paper?

I’ll tell you what might happen.

It might catch onto a shed, or fence. Then the shed and fence will go up, and then the neighbours, on both sides.

This happened to us few months back. Only we back onto a car garage and that caught fire too.

Firefighters said, few more minutes and car engines would have exploded taking out all the back of the properties.

So, yes, bonfires can go wrong.

Keep an eye on it OP!

BTW it wasn’t us, it was a neighbour with the bonfire.

I am 48 and always had garden bonfires and fireworks