Neighborhoods

Poll open to guests.

Also, a question about your general residential area and chosen housing, in hindsight. What type of area do you live in, ex. Village, Town Centre, Housing Estate, etc.) and what have been the pro's and con's? What do you wish you'd known before locating, what will you keep in mind for your next move? For instance:

We live near the town center of a 50,000 population town.

The Pro's:

Being close to parks, shops, public transport.

Cons:

Crime (burglaries)
Pub patrons going round drunkenly and noisily in the night.
Traffic
Street parking room and permits
Neighbor's cats (15+ in neighborhood) coming in our house through the cat flap fighting with our cat at 3 am.

Housing type: Terraced
Pro's: small garden

Con's: terraced housing is like apartment living, noise of neighbors, and them complaining about your breathing, er noises , small garden

We live in a vastly different neighborhood than I did back home. I used to live in Suburbia where you had to drive 5 miles to the nearest grocery store. Here I live near the city centre in the largest student area.

I found I had more problems back home. Mainly because we got to know our immediate neighbors and didn't like them. There was the wife beating jerk and his b*tchy wife to our right, the bankrupt-stealing our garbage-and rotten kids to the left and cat killing, jock (who I went to school with) with annoying dogs across the street from us.

Plus my brother always got himself into trouble and we'd come home to find our house ransacked with a note telling him to pay up.

In our current neighborhood, no one bothers us.

However, I wanted to bring this up. We have an orange and white cat who looks strikingly like the cat two doors down. Yesterday, we were walking out of our house when I noticed our neighbor across the street pointing out our cat (who was sitting in the window) to his wife. She just stared with her mouth hanging open. After a few seconds she looked at me and said "Did you knick the neighbors cat?". She wasn't laughing or anything, she was totally serious. I was hugely insulted and annoyed. Jon just said she was joking around, but I don't think so. We argued about it for awhile before I chalked it up to cultural difference. Was I wrong to be offended by it? I'm just upset that the first time she ever talks to us, she accuses us of stealing a cat.

Ugh, I'm annoyed just thinking of it.

I've been accused of stealing a cat as well. By another parent at my daughter's school. So consequently my daughter bears the brunt of being a cat kidnapper. I found a kitten in the road near the school, bleeding foot, took it home, asked a parent at school about the cat, word spread, and she stormed up demanding her cat back when I was at the school later that day to pick up my daughter. I should have kept my mouth shut, the cat would have been better off with us.

I've experienced no real problems since we moved to the US - we were the only tenants in a small apartment building in New York  The landlord lived with his wife and their son on the ground floor, the three other apartments were empty.  Our landlord was lovely, and very helpful; after our six-month lease was up he allowed us to continue to pay rent without signing another lease, until we needed to leave.  He returned our deposit in full too.  

At my in-laws house in SW Virginia one set of neighbors had moved out, but we got on well with the guy, a friend of theirs, that they had stop by each day to check on the property.  On the other side the owners were old and cranky, I never spoke with them, but did exchange waves with the old duffer when we was out on his mower.

Now that we're in NC, the neighbors are very nice.  We have spoken with the two nearest neighbors on one side, and the four nearest on the other, which accounts for the whole of our end of the cul-de-sac as the house two-along on the one side is opposite the house four-along on the other.  Everyone is friendly, and the only minor problem we've had is that our next-door neighbor has "improved" his street-front drain  so that it flows into the easment which runs past our house.  He had every right to do this, I just wish he had mentioned it to me before he actually did it. (Minor  )

Th only house I had in London was a row house in Wimbledon.  There I also knew two neighbors on one side and three on the other.  The problems I had:

(1) making two much hammering and drilling noise when one set of neighbors had a small child.  We agreed a "curfew" for my home improvement work, which worked fine until they decided to put their daughter to bed an hour earlier, but didn't tell me, which led to another angry rap on the door.

(2) the time that we were replacing the whole kitchen - not only units and plumbing, but also wiring, ceiling, and sheet-rock wallskins too.  I went round to tell our neighbors that we would be working in an evening but would stop at a certain time and they were fine with that.  Then a couple of days later they still came around to complain!  

(3) after one neighbor moved out I decide to "prune" the shared hedge, initially removing everything about abbout 4' on my side of the property line - the hedge had a total height of about 7'.  This left an ugly looking hedge, and an angry neighbor when she came back to check on her property one day.  We managed to settle our differences and she let me level the hedge at the lower height, which is what I had wanted all along but knew that she wouldn't agree to it.  

I think that the problems with neighbors in the UK is that they are so very much closer than they are for most people in the US.

I am going to state about the home I know I am moving to...  We live in the country...  only thing around us is a couple that share same building with us, a farm house across the field...and a gun club across the street...  So far it seems that everything is nice there...  just need to make plans away for the day when gun club is having a tournament...

I grew up in the country when I was young...then moved to a planned community with parents as a teenager...  most of my life has been in neighborhoods...  some nice, others not so nice...  last one I just moved from was ok since my house was secluded on large property by the water...  but the neighbors were a bit off...  their teenagers were having parties just about every weekend and the cars were being reved often late at night...plus dirt bike jumping picnic table in afternoons...  was a bit nerve wracking.  

I look forward to going back to the country...  nearest store for us will be at least 6 miles away in Morpeth.

We live in the States.  We use to live in a fairly large city north of Dallas in Texas but in 2001 we moved to a little country town.  It is very far from where my husband works and there really isn't anything close by like stores and whatnot.  We thought we would be trail blazers but it isn't working out...lol.  We thought a country town would equal friendly neighbors but it hasn't.  We have 2 men that live together next door and a family of 5 on the other side.  The 2 men are very standoffish and barely wave.  The family is fine except that we aren't real pleased with their big pit bull mix dog that barks from time to time in the middle of the night.  The rest of the people are just....I dunno.....not friendly I guess.  My husband will deliberately try and make eye contact to see if people will say hi and they'll do whatever it takes not to meet his eyes...lol.  I think it's an American thing.  My experiences in England have been different.  People were friendly to me when we passed on the street.  In some ways I'm not looking forward to being so close to neighbors but maybe we'll get lucky and get a cute little country home with no one close by...lol.

The biggest of it:
Living in England has me "breathing". It's so rich in culture and history that there's always some sort of learning experience. And it's so close to even more learning experiences. I feel I can grow here; where I moved from I was definitely stagnant for 20 years.

The bigger of it:
Wiltshire has got to be the all-round prettiest county I've seen. Driving around the countryside, it's all eye-candy for me. There are pretty spots everywhere, but Wiltshire seems to have such a wide variation of things. Because it's in the heart of a huge tourism business (Bath, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Avebury) there's much around to see and do. Transportation is pretty good, and London and back (with a few hours there to do something) is certainly do-able in a day. It's actually central to a lot of cities. I also love that it's rather quirky. Home to crop circles and white horses and moonrakers...and many celebs have retreats here. (If you hear someone say they "live in the country" it's usually going to be Wiltshire.)

The smaller of it:
Melksham is not a posh location. Nor is it a very pretty town. But what it lacks in sophistication, it has hands down in friendliness. Having been in Melksham for almost four years, I feel a part of the community. It's also a very gossipy place, so people already knew about me so I haven't had a massive amount of "OH! You're American!".
    I love going into the bank, or Post Office or local eatery and being recognized. Or when walking into town, someone you know drives by in a car and pulls over just to have a short chat 'hello'. Not a huge place, nor too small, there's about 18,000 living here (to my recollection).
    The town itself has a few troublemakers, but I feel safe on the streets at night. Petty crime exists, but I don't "feel" it; I just read about it in the paper. Shops aren't plenty, but you can find just about everything you need. Not a lot of graffitti, not a lot of litter.

The smallest of it:
I love our house. Even when it was all gutted and had no electrity or plumbing or cable or phones or gas or heating or broadband... (wait...I've got to draw a line at that last one)... it still had character. They don't make them like they used to and this place isn't going anywhere. Solid construction. Thick Bath stone walls.
    We live just on the outskirts. Makes a nice walk in to town for an Indian on a summer evening. I also like living on a cul-de-sac...not a heavy amount of traffic to and fro. Mostly bicycles, actually! It's also a short walk to a community pool, a leisure centre and several pubs.
    The neighbors ajoining us (we're semi detached) have been thorns in a lot of peoples' sides and it appears we picked the short straw moving in next to them. Council hearings, Environmental Protection recordings, police warnings, solicitor threats have all whittled it down to not speaking to each other being the best way to get along. They've had their house on the market for two months, but haven't accepted any offers yet. The other neighbors, every single one of them, are fabulous. But they may be bending over backwards for us considering all we've had to deal with.

Blessings:
One of the things I feel is a "duty" is to give back into the community. This is a community that isn't too big to not notice, nor too small to have little to contribute toward it. It's also a town that needs things and it's been very easy to jump straight in without having to be screened or tested first. For this reason, the feeling of being able to make a difference to the better of the community, I would choose Melksham again in a heartbeat. And it's not just us either; people drop anything to lend a hand here. It's a rare, unspoiled spirit.

Regrets:
If we had it to do all over again, we would have checked out the neighbors more thoroughly. We did meet them beforehand and walked away with the thought that we'd either love them or hate them. We should have asked more about comments the seller made, "I don't think the neighbors like us." But we were excited to be getting the house and purposely blind to any troubles, feeling we could win over the neighbors...who wouldn't like us? Well, they'll be gone when their house sells, and the other neighbors more than make up...after one especially trying confrontation, another neighbor brought us strawberries she'd picked and fresh double cream, purposely in view of the offending neighbors. I was quite touched, but rather embarassed.

Dreaming a blank canvas:
To go anywhere...
My husband and I have mulled over this quite extensively. We have a business here, so we have to consider if it's the right place for us to run our business. We don't have to worry about things such as: Does it have good schools nearby? Is it in a decent family-type neighborhood? Are there a lot of things for kids to do?
    We had to consider our business in: How close is it to bus/train service? Are there adequate local services such as accommodation and eating establishments? Are there things to do in the evening for business people on their own?
    I think when it all boils down to where you choose to live, you're going to have to list all your priorities. What's perfect for me, won't be satisfactory for someone else. But the neighbor issue, that's BIG.
N.B. I'd probably not do a semidetached again.