Lockdown Made Our Street Into a Community

Five years ago, almost to the day, my wife and I were sitting on our sofa, feeling like the world was ending. Schools were closed, offices were closed, shops were closed. The entire country was locked indoors. We did not know how long it would last or how bad it might get. We only knew that people were dying, and that supermarket shelves had gaps where the pasta and toilet paper should be.

On that day, we heard someone slip something into our mail-slot and found a small, handwritten note poking through.

“Hello, neighbours,” it read. “Things are uncertain, and I know a lot of people are wondering what’s going on. Some might need help with food or just reassurance. I’m starting a WhatsApp group for the street, so we can share ideas and resources if we need to. If you’d like to join, find me at this number on WhatsApp, and I’ll add you to the group.”

It was signed with a name, a phone number, and an address down the street.

I stared at it. Was it a scam? Surely, no one would hand-write or hand-deliver a scam to our door during a pandemic.

We sat on it for a day, then decided to give it a chance.

WhatsApp groups were not a new thing at this point. But, for the most part, they were limited to groups with shared interests — hikers, volunteers, people looking for lost pets. The idea of a neighbourhood chat group had already gained some traction in the US prior to lockdown, but in London, they were still relatively rare.

Perhaps British reserve plays a part in this: that tendency to be friendly while playing your emotional cards close. What we would later learn is that the woman who started the group was from Australia and, like us, had only lived on the street for a short time.

But there is also the almost universal urban effect to consider. People in cities everywhere tend to keep to themselves. It is a way of dealing with the overwhelming numbers of people around you. A way to carve out a little privacy in an environment packed with strangers.

But lockdown made all those strangers seem much further away.

When the organiser added us to her group, there were already twenty-five people. Soon, there were thirty-five. Almost the entire street had joined, and the group was bubbling with chat. People were starved for information, starved for conversation, starved for connection.

And, as it turns out, they were excited to meet their neighbours.

My wife and I already knew our upstairs neighbours, who shared the garden next to ours. They were friendly and outgoing, and before lockdown, they had even offered to look after our garden while we were on holiday. But we hadn’t met anyone else. When we first moved in, we’d hoped to meet more of our neighbours but kept putting it off. Now, we weren’t sure how to go about it. Should we bring over cookies? Should they bring us cookies? Should we just knock and say hello? Should we leave a note? Was it simply too late to bother?

We assumed that the street’s long-term residents already knew one another. But as my phone began to buzz with messages, it quickly became clear that very few of us knew anyone. Our cozy little street was filled with all kinds of interesting people: NHS workers, people from local historical societies, tech workers, teachers. And most had kept to themselves, commuting to and from work, never really speaking to anyone except to say hello on the doorstep. Everyone was curious to meet, but no one had wanted to be the first.

This community, as it turns out, had been a community in name only. And now that everyone was meeting for the first time, the entire vibe of the place had started to change. Our community had begun to feel communal.

Humans are meant to live in small groups. It is the way we are designed, the way we have evolved.

We are unlikely to ever really overcome this. There are solid psychological barriers to the numbers of people we can bring into our inner circles.

One of these barriers is the so-called Dunbar number. Established by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the theory goes that the largest number of people a social group can handle is approximately 150. After that, the group becomes too large, too unwieldy. It begins to split and splinter into smaller, more manageable groups.

There are more precise numbers within this larger context as well. A BBC News article puts it like this:

According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people — loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.

Dunbar isn’t sure why these layers of numbers are all multiples of five, but says, “this number five does seem to be fundamental to monkeys and apes in general.”

Dunbar’s theory has its detractors, but even if you debate the nuts and bolts of it, there is also the simpler temporal barrier: we can only be close to a certain number of people at any given time. You simply can’t have 1,500 close personal friends, not because you can’t remember them, but because you would never have enough time to work on those friendships. There would be no way to be there for those people when they needed you. No way to invest the energy it takes to keep a close personal friend.

But if the theory is even close to accurate, a single street of fifty houses is the ideal community.

Perhaps you had a similar experience. Perhaps you didn’t. But many streets and communities in the UK (and elsewhere) experienced this rise in solidarity — residents suddenly engaged, helpful, and outgoing. The crisis galvanised the population in ways that no one had expected. People were offering needed items: extra cat litter, nappies, assistance. Many went out of their way to make sure other people — local people — were okay.

There was also information to share: updates and debates on the most recent Covid advice, stories about whose family members were in the hospital, and people checking in on older residents who did not use WhatsApp and whose family lived far away. And there were jokes and photos and people just saying hello to buoy everyone up.

Our earliest human groups were tribes and villages. Even until the middle ages, communities were defined by their isolation. We made do with the resources we had at hand because travelling took time and effort, energy and food.

In some ways, this is what we returned to during lockdown. We returned to a time of small towns, local shops, travel on foot or by bicycle, and relying on neighbours to help each other out. The communities we’d built online could give us emotional support, but they couldn’t leave a bag of cat litter on the doorstep. Couldn’t check to see if the octogenarian in Number 47 was doing well.

As time went on, our chat group settled into ten or fifteen voices that were regular contributors while the rest continued lurking. And there was nothing wrong with that — people looked at the group as a source of information about what was going on around them, even if they weren’t directly participating. And sometimes, they jumped in to help if they felt like it. Or to request help if they needed it.

The point is that all of us, even those who were not active, knew that when it came down to it, someone on the street would step up when help was needed.

Once the first and then the second lockdowns had passed, our street threw a party. Things had become quieter on the app, and we weren’t sure if the only people attending the party would be the same fifteen of us that had been active all along.

But, instead, the party was an enormous blow-out. Almost every person on the street showed up, and maybe a few from around the corner.

There we were: freed from lockdown, chatting by tables loaded with more food than any of us could eat, moving in and out of one another’s houses to grab extra chairs or parasols, to pick up potato salad and bowls of hummus. Gates open, doors open. We chatted about so much more than just our jobs and backgrounds because we knew all of those things already. We were closer than that.

Was it all perfect? Of course not. Every street, every neighbourhood, every community is going to have its feuds, its beefs, its petty spats.

Neighbour A had an ongoing argument with Neighbour B, because Neighbour A had been forced to work from home while Neighbour B was doing renovations, which were often loud. The bad blood from this argument went on for months after the renovations were over. For all I know, it might still be happening.

The truth is that this, too, is community. This is life.

My wife and I were forced to move from this street when our landlord sold our flat. But out of sheer curiosity (or nosiness), I stayed in the group chat.

That chat is still active. That community is still active. Still cohesive and helpful. I lurk and infrequently post, and it’s nice to follow the lives of these people that had become my people for a while. We still have friends on that street.

The immediacy of lockdown has faded. Most of the posts now are about fly-tipping, lost cats, and suggestions for good builders. But now and then, someone posts a photo of their garden or boasts about their children graduating. Sometimes, someone asks for help, and someone else will offer it.

I know that when they open their doors, they recognise each other, say hello, and probably stop to chat for a minute or two.

In cities, we have a choice. We can live in relative anonymity and try to find belonging in a spread-out web of connections. Or we can make the effort and try to build a community where we live. You don’t even have to be an influential pillar of the community to do it.

Yes, if your neighbours are arseholes, there may be nothing you can do to change that. And sometimes, I worry that the pandemic and the uncertainty that came with it were the only reasons that any of this was possible.

But then I find something like Patty Smith’s wonderful “Stoop Coffee” story on Substack, and I think, Maybe all it takes is someone to take that chance. Someone willing to put themselves out there — to drink coffee in front of their home instead of behind it, to say hello for the first time, to deliver cookies next door, or just slip a bit of paper into a neighbour’s mailbox to get things started.

It takes a brave action. But what it can build is so much more. ◼︎

What I’m reading: Simply put, at the beginning of every new month, you’ll find me reading the new edition of Clarkesworld Magazine because it is addictively good literary-minded science-fiction, and I devour every issue.

What I’m watching: I have been working on a review of Nippon TV’s The Hot Spot on Netflix, which we recently finished. The show is uproariously funny, savvy, deadpan and silly. I can scarcely contain myself when I try to describe just how much joy it gave me, and yet I struggle to write the review because I honestly don’t know if anyone who hasn’t lived in Japan will find it funny.

Most of the humour is in the delivery of the show’s characters — the dialogue is so effortlessly natural, so perfectly mundane in the face of absurdity. It left me giggling all the way through.

So, please, watch it and let me know if you feel the same. You know, for posterity.

What I’m doing: Doing? Doing!? A week has passed and I haven’t done a damn thing! This section is giving me anxiety just by writing it!

I fed the roses and wrote a short poem about it. Does that count?