Becoming Neighbours (1)

We Are Made by Our Relationships

Our Summer Camp this year with Ukrainian families most of whom had not met each other before but now form a strong mutually supportive community in Leicestershire.

Think of a woman in her late seventies who has lived on the same street for forty years. She knew the names of everyone in the terrace when she arrived. She can now name two. Nobody has been unkind to her. The houses have simply turned over, one by one, to people who work long hours, drive to the supermarket, order online, and are pleasant enough when they pass her on the pavement. She is not in any crisis a service would recognise. She is not ill, not destitute, not at risk. She is just steadily becoming less of a person, because fewer people know her.

Or think of a young man who has moved to a new city for work. He has a good salary, a flat he chose from an app, and three hundred contacts on his phone. He has not been inside anyone else’s home since he arrived. When his boiler broke in February he had no one to ask what might be wrong, so he paid someone he found online and sat in his coat until they came. He would not describe himself as lonely. He would say he is busy. But he has begun to notice that there is no one in this city who would notice if he left.

Neither of these is a dramatic story. That is the point. Most of what is going wrong in our neighbourhoods is not dramatic. It is a quiet thinning of the ties that once held people in place.

Relationships are not an add-on

We tend to talk about relationships as though they were a nice extra, the social garnish on a life whose real substance is elsewhere: in income, health, housing, education. Get those right, the thinking goes, and community will look after itself.

I have come to believe, after forty years of working in and around institutions, that this has things the wrong way round. We are not self-contained individuals who then choose to enter relationships. We are made by our relationships. Who we become depends on who notices us, who argues with us, who relies on us, who forgives us. A child learns her own name because someone speaks it to her. A man learns he is trustworthy because someone trusts him. Take away the web of recognition and something in the person begins to go missing.

This is not a sentimental claim. The evidence on loneliness and health, on social connection and recovery, on trust and economic resilience, points the same way. People with strong local ties live longer, recover faster, and cope better when things go wrong. Neighbourhoods where people know one another are safer, and they respond better when there is a flood or a death or a closure. But the deeper point is not about outcomes. It is about what a human being is. We are relational all the way down.

What has pushed relationships out

If that is true, why are we so poor at it now? It is tempting to reach for blame: smartphones, young people, incomers, the council. I don’t think blame helps. It closes down the imagination just when we need it most. It is more useful to ask what forces are shaping how we live, forces none of us chose and all of us take part in.

Three stand out. None of them is bad in itself. Each is a good thing that has broken out of its proper boundaries.

The first is the market. Markets are extraordinary at getting goods to people. But slowly, almost without noticing, we have come to treat more and more of life as a transaction. The young man with the broken boiler did the sensible thing. He bought a solution. What he did not do, because nothing in his world suggested it, was knock on a door and ask for help, which is how relationships begin. Every need met by purchase is a small missed opportunity for being known.

The second is the sovereign self, the conviction that the most important task in life is to discover and express who I really am. There is real good here: freedom from narrow expectations, permission to be different. But when the self becomes the centre of everything, other people become either an audience or an obstacle. Neighbours, who are simply given to us rather than chosen, fit neither category comfortably.

The third is management by system: the habit of treating every human difficulty as a technical problem to be measured, targeted and solved. It is how we run public services, and much of what it has achieved is genuinely good. But systems work by categorising people, and the woman on the terrace does not fit a category. She has no “presenting need”. So she falls between the cracks, not because anyone failed, but because the thing she lacks, which is to be known, cannot be delivered by a service.

Put these three together and you have a society that is materially richer and relationally poorer than the one it replaced. We did not choose it. It crept up on us.

A place of belonging

The organisation I now work for, Toc H, began in a house behind the lines in the First World War. It was a place where soldiers of any rank could walk in, drink tea, and be treated as equals. Over the door was a sign inviting all who entered to abandon rank. What mattered was not what a man was worth or what he could do, but that he was there, and that others were there with him.

I think often about that house. It did not solve the war. It did not deliver outcomes. What it did was create the conditions in which people could recognise one another as people. That, it turns out, is what they remembered for the rest of their lives.

The shared table

In his recent book Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local, the American writer Amar Peterman argues that the common good is not an abstraction to be designed at national level. It is something grown locally, between particular people, in particular places.

His governing image is a shared table: something like a community meal, where everyone brings a dish and nobody controls the menu. I find this helpful precisely because it is so ordinary. A shared table has no strategy. It has no key performance indicators. It works because people turn up, sit down next to someone they wouldn’t otherwise meet, and eat. Listening happens. Small obligations form. Next time the boiler breaks, there is someone to ask.

Peterman also uses the image of the gardener. Nobody makes a plant grow. What a gardener can do is tend the conditions: soil, light, water, time. Neighbourhoods are like that. You cannot manufacture belonging, but you can make it more or less likely.

What this asks of us

If we are made by our relationships, then building neighbourhoods is not a soft option alongside the hard business of economics and services. It is foundational. It also asks for a different posture from the one most of our institutions are built for.

It asks for presence rather than provision: being around, reliably, over time, rather than arriving with a programme and disappearing when the funding runs out.

It asks for equality of regard: the conviction, which the soldiers found in that house, that people’s dignity does not depend on wealth or position or usefulness.

It asks for patience: relationships grow at human speed, not at the speed of a funding cycle.

And it asks for letting local people lead. Neighbourhoods know things about themselves that no outside agency will ever know. The role of any larger organisation is to support that knowledge, not to replace it.

Toc H has recently refurbished a community building in Eveswell, in Newport in South Wales. When we arrived, the community had not so much declined as run out of energy. On reflection, that was because it had run out of connections. There was no single problem to fix. The threads that let people find one another had simply worn through.

Today it looks very different. Hundreds of people gather in and around that building every week. There are arts and crafts, family fun days, support for parents with children, and courses in digital media, as well as a whole range of other activities. If you want outputs and outcomes, we have them in abundance: attendance figures, qualifications gained, and lives that have genuinely changed direction. Funders rightly ask for these, and we are glad to give them.

But anyone who spends an afternoon there will tell you the numbers are not the heart of it. Underneath the activities there is something harder to measure: a warmth, and an attentiveness. People are noticed when they come in, and missed when they don’t. The mother who first came for the under-fours group now stays to help set up. The man who came for a digital course now knows half the room by name. The activities are the reason people come through the door. The relationships are the reason they come back, and the reason the place feels alive.

This is exactly what management by system struggles to see. You can count the people at a craft session. You cannot count the moment someone realises they belong. Yet it is that deeper thing, invisible to the spreadsheet, that turned a tired building into the centre of a community again. We did not deliver it. We created the conditions and let people find one another.

Where this series is going

Over the next few posts I want to take these ideas further: what exactly has happened to the places we live, why our best-intentioned institutions often make it worse, and what practices might help us become neighbours again. Peterman names some of them (compassion, attentiveness, shared grief, and walking alongside), and I want to ask what each looks like on an ordinary British street.

For now, a simple question. Who on your street would notice if you weren’t there? And whose absence would you notice?

That is where the common good begins.

**You can read Paul's blogs here.