Should neighbours be friends

[Ramseystreet]

Just wondered what other peoples relationship with their neighbours Is like? I have lived in 5 different houses and have been friends with 3 of them but just on "hello" terms with others.

I have never met either of my neighbours in this house. Dd1 plays with the boys over the road when they allow her, but she is much younger than them, so most of the time they just run off into the park, where she is not allowed.

Can't say I blame them really. I can't imagine many teenage boys would be over joyed at playing with a 6 yo girl.

I try to build, well not friendships, but good neighbourly relationships with them.
I feel stressed if I share a wall with someone and they don't acknowledge me if we pass each other.

when I move in somewhere new I make sure I let my neighbours know when removal vans are coming / when we're doing aquavacing / banging in picture hooks etc and that usually give us an excuse to get introduced and they hopefully see that I am considerate, and hopefully return the favor.

I'd say we're on christmas card terms with 3 of them, and hallway chats terms with the rest

we're lucky to have a lovely neighbour - we let each other know when we're going on holiday/away for the weekend and keep an eye on each others houses.

She's constantly saying 'let me know if you need anything'

I love my neighbourhood and I am on good friends basis with most of my neighbours. My next door neighbour and I have keys to each others houses and we just let ourselves in. We also have a gate between our gardens so the kids can pop in and out whenever they want.

The place we lived before we had some very good friends who we are still in touch with now. When we moved to this new place it took about a year to cultivate new relationships but I love coming home in the summer now as I can guarentee someone will have already opened a bottle of wine and on Fridays we usually all get a takeaway together.

I really couldn't ask to live near a nicer bunch of people and the kids have great childhood friends because of it.

For some reason DP struck up a hello/goodbye friendship with one neighbout over the street, however all the rest we don't speak to, just a waved acknowledgemnet when we see each other.

Have no desire to be friends with my neighbours.

This is really weird but on one side we have new neighbours pretty regularly and they have always been friendly on the other side is an older couple who never speak yet their son his girlfriend and their grandson chat away to me ....

I am best friends with one of my neighbours, she used to live next door but moved a couple of houses along, our dc are in the same class at school, she takes my youngest to school in the morning and I do the evening school run. In the holidays her dc practically live at mine.

Friendly with neighbour on one side, have each other round for coffee etc, put each others bins out when on hols. Haven't got much time for neighbours on other side as they block our drive or use it to turn on, say hello but that is all.

Have a couple of sprightly 80 year olds at the end of our cul de sac who are gems. Pop in and out of their house for coffee frequently, they are trying to teach me about gardening and give me cuttings, which I often kill.

We're godparents to next door's dd, they're godparents to our ds3. We only met when we moved here 7 years ago.

Our street's a bit like that though - we all know each other/look out for each other. Eg. lady over the road's husband is in a hospice so we've taken it in turns to drive her there when the weather was bad. When we had a power cut in January people made sure everyone had some hot water/ hot food.

We have a street party every Summer and sing carols at Christmas. I love it here

In the village I grew up in, a few of our neighbours saw us being burgled by a drug addict from the town whilst my babysitter and I slept upstairs. They all decided that because my mother was a single mother (separated but not yet divorced) that this 19 yr old rough looking kid was a casual sh@g of hers (she was not dating) and not only walked past, but gossiped about it so much that even now (after he was caught and convicted) some don't believe it was a burgler.

I escaped village life and now have an urban existence. Here my neighbors will sign for our parcels and pop them round to us when they see us come home, but the difference is, here they've not been tampered with to see what's inside

woooOOOOOps
wrong thread

We are not friends with any of our neighbours. We live in an area where most of the occupants are elderly. Our neighbour who lives directly next door to us isn't elderly and we feed her cat when she's away. TBH she takes the piss a bit with just how often she asks us to feed it and says its for a certain length of time and then when she drops off the keys adds on a couple of extra days!

The house across the drive is a second home. The owners are only there a couple of months of the year, thank god because they are a pain in the arse. They are elderly, wake us up early in the morning by making lots of noise outside, make sarcastic remarks if our lawn reaches heights of over 2cm and are always reporting back to our landlord (he's getting fed up with them too).
If other people stay in their house they are a pain too, dogs sh*tting on our doorstep, putting rubbish in our bins but the wrong type of rubbish (recycling and household), putting the bins out on the pavement but right in front of our driveway.....that type of thing.

I am very good friends with one, neighbour - actually she has just left after popping in for a coffee.
I spend time with her every other day or so.
Good chatty terms with 3 others
Say hello to the rest.

In summer there is often a gaggle of us out watching DC play and having a coffee sitting on one of our garden walls

I love having friendly neighbours, I have built all of these relationships in the last year since H left. He was a very private person and hated to chat to neighbours - total oposite of me.

I did, was good friends with my neighbour...but it ended VERY badly and was like a living torture each time i saw her. I was a mess every time i had to leave the house in case i saw her etc etc.

I am now "aloof" with new neighbours, say hello, but do not enter into any conversation.
Fingers well and truly burned im afraid.

not my immediate neighbours. One is a snooty cow and the other is an old lady, nice enough but a bit nosy.
However my best friend from school lives at the end of my road, and another old friend lives next door to her and DP's nephew and his girlfriend live just along from them.
(Now I'm humming the Neighbours theme tune in my head - thanks for that !!)

We have a real weirdo who lives directy opposite. He accused dh of waking his elderly mother up in the middle of the night by slamming the van door and took a dislike to dh when dh replied he'd like to appologise but it wasn't him (it really wasn't). DH made the mistake of parking over his drive a couple of times for about a min while moving another car into our driveway, both times MrWeirdo came out and shouted obsenities, once when the kids were in the car. To top it all I caught him watching out of his bedroom window a handful of times when I was sitting on the sofa breastfeeding DD2!!! He also used to watch whenever we went out at night. Very very creepy

We got net curtains and not long after that I realised that all of our neighbours either have nets or keep their blinds down all the time...including the two big burly blokes that live next door.

Needless to say we are NOT friends!

In London, I always introduced myself to neighbours and we always became friends (apart from the paedophile in Battersea, but that's a whole other story.) Out here in the country, though, people seem far more insular. I don't have any friends locally.

It might be because most of the townspeople were born here. In big cities, you get more used to making friends with new people.

I miss London

Mampam what rampant ageism! What does being elderly have to do with whether you are friends with your neighbours or not? If they are annoying, that's irrespective of their age.
Have just invited two of our neighbours to our wedding, so I'd say we are friends!

To be fair, being elderly can mean that people get up earlier than is strictly necessary, and are overly fussy about outside appearances of houses, as mampam's elderly neighbours are ... can also mean they're unreconstituted racists, as one of our older neighbours is. Equally, they can be very lovely, dote on one's children, and be in a lot of time in order to take in one's Amazon deliveries - we have one of those too.

We don't speak to one of our immediate neighbours, as while the woman and kids seem okay he is a scary man who intermittently lets rip with diatribes consisting mostly of the word 'fuck', and throws things against the connecting wall (NOT the wife and kids, or I'd be calling the police). Next-door-but-one have kids three months younger and 14 months older than DD, we swap school runs, playdates and sleepovers, and they have fabulous parties to which we are occasionally invited.

Oh Grace,that is very sad.Where abouts in the country are you?

I'm friendly with all my neighbours-everyone in the village in fact.There isn't one person who wouldn't stop for a chat if we passed in the street.A lot of them are pensioners,but that doesn't make any difference.

When we lived in town though,a lot of the neighbours would just blank us in the street.For a long while we didn't know,but eventually we found out it was because we owned our house,were married and both had jobs.A kind of reverse snobbery I suppose.People can be very odd.

I have lived in a house converted into 2 flats for years. I have had a superfically friendly relationship for 21 years including inviting him for Christmas much to my dd's disgust. He told me he didn't like me, compared me to the witches in Macbeth etc. I have now cut my "friendship" with him and interestingly it has impacted on him quite deeply as he goes out a lot less than he did. Think he relied on me for human contact. When he leaves which he will I will keep my distance from my next downstairs neighbour!!!!! Shame it took 21 years...

Interestingly I was friends with mostly elderly neighbours. People our age don't seem as friendly, maybe it's a sign of modern times that everyone is too busy. When I was young and lived in terrace the whole street knew each other. someone posted similar on here which is nice to hear.

agree with Ramseystreet, we got to know our eldery neighbors straight away, the ones our age kept themselves to themselves for ages (not always a bad thing LOL)