Are we less tolerant to noise? Neighbourhoods have always been noisy

[Fishareidiots]

Just that really.
In generations gone by I expect everyone used their gardens much more as there was less on telly, plus they weren’t all at cinema, b&q, softplay, swimming. So what has changed?
why is it now that there are so many complaints about kids playing, chatting, sunbathing in bikinis, drinking alcohol etc.

The loudest complainers are those who feel entitled to silence. My neighbours were playing music in their garden last weekend and instead of demanding silence, we asked them to turn it up so we could enjoy it too.

We have had a BBQ with friends so we let our neighbours know and asked them to send us a message if we were too loud at all. No one complained and we were told to have a good time.

As long as it’s not antisocial (loud swearing, shouting, screaming, revving, etc.), I don’t mind hearing noise from our neighbours. When our kids are outside, we don’t expect them to be silent but they’re not allowed to shout or scream. We tell them to stop or they have to come inside.

I don’t think people would have made the same choices, because we were raised to be quiet in public. If you were out, on a bus or in a waiting room or somewhere, you were taught to “keep your voice down”. If you were talking loudly enough for people to overhear, you were “drawing attention to yourself” which was considered extremely rude. Even as young children, having fun in the garden or at the park, we’d be told to “Stop screeching” if we laughed too loudly!

I’m not suggesting we should go back to the days of “Children should be seen, but not heard”, but children should be taught that their volume shouldn’t negatively impact others, or they’ll grow into adults who still don’t seem to understand this basic social decency.

Children could always be noisy, but I have neighbours whose daughters scream like crabs being boiled when they're out playing. That wouldn't have been tolerated by parents when I was growing up.

This.

People don’t want to be neighbours any more. They want to smoke weed, play loud music and rev their silly bikes at 1am. It’s not the hustle and bustle of life any more, it’s antisocial behaviour at antisocial times.

My neighbour (socks over leggings Rebekah Vardy type) now gives me a filthy look every time I leave my front door because I once asked her (politely!) to move her (second) van as it was blocking our driveway and we couldn’t get in.

I think it's a combination of entitlement, lack of respect and consideration.

I'm very sensitive to loud noise particularly loud music because in my last house the neighbours played it loudly for 10 hours every single day through the pandemic. They then stopped at midnight and 3 hours later my other neighbour high on coke thought shouting at her bf or on her phone was a good thing to do for a few hours.

When I was young we didn't bother the neighbours. Quite rightly they didn't want to hear someone else's noise after they finished work or on Sundays when they wanted to be quiet. We played out until teatime and then we were inside. We were often told if we weren't good we'd stay in. It's how I raised my DS and we lived in a street of small cottages. We never heard each other if we were indoors, we didn't have a hot tub or people round until late.

Even as a student and young person we weren't too noisy or messy. We recognised that other people had different lives. Now it seems in my city the noise and mess from students is considered okay.

Everyone seems to want everyone to know their business. So many shout into their phones and get in people's way. I've even had a man try to start a conversation with me whilst his wife was on the phone so that would be three of us?

Gardens are smaller than they used to be, kids are kept at home whereas they used to go out to play with their mates at the park/over the fields/in the street, fewer power tools (just a lawnmower for most), fewer options for playing music in the garden, no hot tubs or bouncy castles or trampolines.

Re the music, I do remember one neighbour who threw open his French doors to his music room on sunny weekend days and play the most amazing classical music. It was a joy as he was very good. When I was practicing my instruments my parents made me keep the windows shut! 😂

Sorry not sure why that posted twice! 😳

We've bought into rampant individualism and the impact goes both ways. Not enough to consideration to others when you're doing something (like being noisy early/ late) and less tolerance for the fact that living near people will come with inconvenient like noise you'd rather live without.

Modern estates have tiny gardens compared to house space. So it is hard to feel you aren’t part of your neighbour’s lives. People aren’t as considerate in some ways…I’ve noticed it in theatre and gigs and cinema.

We wouldn’t have been allowed to shriek all day in the garden as kids.

outdoor music,it’s a particular beef of mine, at the beach or people jogging along to audible music, playing it on public transport…it’s so much easier than when you’d have had to haul a boombox with you!

I grew up in an older council house with plenty space and thick stone walls. We never heard neighbours. Now i live in a terraced newer build with walls like paper and we hear everything. So I guess housing has got worse

People have always been pissed off by noise and the antisocial behaviour of others.

Now we have social media so you see more complaints about it.

There has always been people who love making noise and people who hate noise I think the fact that people can now vent their frustrations online is making it seem like more of an issue.

World is louder. And noise is a stressor.

Re kids being loud. We wondered that once at family event and then kids showed us some of their fave animated shows. No ome in that shows used normal talking voice really. There was lots of shouting. Made us wonder if that's standard and one of the reasons so many kids seem to shout rather than talk.

I think pps who mentioned power tools in close quarters (smaller gardens together) are right. I am waiting for someone to start some as it happens for hours every weekend. The problem is that it's not 5 houses for an hour at once, but one house, when that finishes, another starts and so on. They need to organise themselves better😂

All of what has been said by PP re individualism and 'my right to be a loud inconsiderate twat' is more important than anything

i personally feel there should be a special place in hell for the marketing g ppl behind the drive for people to regard their garden as an outdoor living room with an extra special place for the ppl who came out with the idea of "outdoor garden cinemas" mostly sold to ppl whose gardens are 6ft x 6ft and cheek by jowl with all their neighbours. Bonus place if they sold them a hot tub to sit in while watching it

in all seriousness constant excessive noise has been demonstrated to be very damaging to our health and that of wildlife but who cares right? People's right to be noisy arseholes is the must important thing

My friends DS has managed to buy a new build in the keyworker scheme. It’s a decent development but the garden is about a quarter of the size of mine though it’s also a three bed semi. Plus there are no trees or shrubs nor will be for a while though modern taste seems people have very few these days. Lots of concrete and hard surfaces for noise to amplify and bounce off of.

We had a garden when I was a child but I was almost never in it as we roamed for miles. I was around 8 when I was allowed out all day. It was the beach or the local woods for us. Three kids did drown off of where I lived when I was about 12. They were on holiday though and I just remember all of the local kids saying well they didn’t understand the tides nor the sandbanks. We had absolutely no fear and I’m surprised there were not more serious accidents though there was one kid from a village along the way who did break his back or neck and become paralysed from tombstoning. Kids are brutal though we all were very much, well why would you jump off there and not much sympathy.

Plus actual equipment to play music wasn’t so small and portable when I was young. My friends Mums record player was a massive sideboard size Grundig.

People also don’t care what people think these days as there is no shame and it’s all about the individual.

But I’m old enough to remember an old neighbour, who was probably born around 1890 tipping his hat in the street to my Mother.

Not all of them. My paternal GPs lived in a SE London semi (built and
bought pre WW2) that had a very small garden.

And I was initially surprised that dh’s parents’ house, a (to me) very large 6 bed Edwardian semi in SW London, also had what seemed a very small garden for the size of house.

The change is more down to people’s individual selfishness and self-entitlement - ie, “I want to do it, so I can”. People are much noisier and think it’s their right - to play loud music, to let their children scream and shout, etc. It used to be the other way - that you should think first about those around you and modify your behaviour - purely because you are part of a neighbourhood and a community.

I think it’s because we are constantly bombarded with other people’s noise these days. Everywhere you go, people are talking loudly, shouting, playing music or videos on their phone with no headphones, FaceTiming etc. Then, when you’re at home everyone seems to be noisy now, too. Music blaring in the garden, people screaming etc. It’s hard to get peace and quiet these days.
I’m actively looking at homes in the middle of nowhere. I just want some peace and quiet when I’m at home!

I don’t think things have got much louder but maybe it depends where you live.
When I was little we used to be loud when playing out but our back gardens were tiny postage stamps so all the children played on a nearby school field all day every day in summer. I can distinctly remember having a screaming contest and the caretaker coming out of his bungalow threatening to give us all a thick ear! We all ran away yelling.
We moved to a council estate when I was 10 and that was really loud too. Lads with those little chicken chaser motorbikes revving all the time, ghetto blasters, barking dogs and a farm over the road with animals and machinery.
Now I live on what is considered locally to be a ‘posh’ estate. Everyone is very apologetic about noise and will grovel on the WhatsApp for having a rogue alarm going off or builders in. It’s still noisy, there are hot tubs, outdoor TV’s, jet washing, dogs, children in the back gardens or on the green and lots of entertaining and were close to farmland so often cows or sheep too.

That’s interesting. My grandparents Victorian/Edwardian terrace in a very urban area, still had quite a decent backyard, then a garage/workshop, then the alley between them and the row behind where children used to play. They didn’t play in the garden, now I think about it, as it was used for growing vegetables.

I agree there are a lot of environmental factors like smaller houses, smaller gardens, more access to technology, changes in working behaviour but I also suspect there's an element of rose tinted glasses here.

I used to live in one of those old tin topped post war prefab houses as a child and it was normal for parents to send their kids to play on the street. I wasn't allowed out to play with other kids. There were gangs of older kids who would routinely cause trouble, glass and syringes all over the playground equipment at the park, the closer you lived to the town centre the more you'd encounter people flopped over from taking spice, those God awful hi-fi systems would be meticulously loaded outside with those huge speakers on every sunny day. Bloody fireworks from drug dealers letting everyone know a crop was in, or shoes on the telephone wires, pubs everywhere. Every housing estate had a pub or 2, drunk people out in the sun, squashed beer cans every few meters down the road. Smashed lambrini bottles. Nightly street feuds that really should have been held in houses. You knew everyone's business whether you were curtain twitching or not because they insisted on making it public.

OTOH my maternal GPs had a 1920s bungalow in what is now a ‘London commute’ area of Hertfordshire. It was on an un-tarmaced road, and had an absolutely vast garden, front, back and sides. The whole plot was sold in the late 70s to a developer, who put at least 6 x 4 bed houses on it.

Goodness knows what that plot would have been worth now!

I was brought up in a bungalow with my brother, we were kids in the 60s. We did have a decent sized garden, bigger than today, but although we played in it during the week after school, on Sundays we were not allowed to go out before about 9am and definitely not allowed to make lots of noise. All the neighbouring bungalows with kids were the same, there were not that many kids living in the road though.

We could play in the road as no one owned a car and through traffic was so unusual but again we had to be fairly quiet, no shrieking, screaming etc.

Other peoples noise today has no bounds, loud radios/TVs, loud phone calls, dogs left to bark, DIY maniacs and of course, the traffic, hot tubs, BBQs and plain old, ultra loud people who love the sound of their own voice above anything else.

Luckily, where I live it's not too bad, neighbours are generally pretty good, occasional dog barking and hardly any kids so it's fairly quiet a lot of the time, thankfully.

I don’t think they have always been noisy. Kids were sent out to play in the past, not confined to small gardens.

Good grief. It doesn’t make me a snob to find my nextdoor neighbour loud, uncouth and deeply unpleasant. Neither does it make me judgemental when I don’t enjoy hearing her children swear at the top of their lungs or appalled when she shrieks into her phone in the garden about her recent sexual exploits.

It’s nothing to do with the cost of living, politics or being a mammal. It’s just about some people being really inconsiderate. Yes, dogs bark, kids scream and people listen to music. That’s life, but the majority of people calm the dog, hush the children and keep the music at a reasonable level. There’s just a few who act and behave in a way that spoils it for all those around them.

I’ve travelled quite a bit and lived overseas. What I’ve noticed is that the majority of people are pleasant, warm, welcoming and considerate but there are some arseholes wherever you go.