Noise, dust, temporary traffic lights, and what sustained proximity to construction teaches you about the neighbourhood you think you live in
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Harper-Thames on life adjacent to a building site.
My next-door building has been under construction for eighteen months and I have developed, over that period, a comprehensive and entirely unsolicited education in the process of construction. I know the rhythm of the working week: the early Monday start, the relative quiet of Friday afternoons, the total silence of weekends that in the first months felt like a relief and now feels slightly eerie. I know the sounds of specific machines and can, if pushed, identify a drill from a grinder from a particular kind of compressor by the sound alone, which is knowledge I would happily trade for never having acquired it.
The Dust
The dust is the thing nobody tells you about. Construction produces dust in quantities that seem impossible for the enclosed site it comes from, dust that travels through closed windows and settles on surfaces with the patient thoroughness of something that has all the time in the world. My flat has been dusty for eighteen months in a specific way that is different from ordinary dust: finer, more pervasive, resistant to ordinary cleaning. I clean more than I used to. The dust returns. This has developed in me a philosophical acceptance of the impermanence of clean surfaces that I consider one of the few genuine personal developments of the period.
The Temporary Traffic Lights
The temporary traffic lights went up in month three and have not come down. They are, I am told by the council notice that arrived through the door, necessary for pedestrian and vehicle safety during the construction period. This is certainly true. They have also increased the commute time of everyone on the street by approximately four minutes each way, which across eighteen months and the number of people who use the street amounts to a quantity of collective time that I have not calculated because doing so would make me angrier than I am already managing to be.
What Construction Teaches
Living next to a building site teaches you that the neighbourhood you think you live in is a process rather than a state. The building going up next door is the same process that produced all the buildings currently standing, including the one I live in, which was itself a building site at some point and was itself the source of dust and noise and inconvenience for whoever lived nearby at the time. The neighbourhood is always being made. The construction is not an interruption of the neighbourhood; it is the neighbourhood, in the phase of its existence that I happen to be present for, doing what it has always done.
When It Ends
The building will be finished in approximately four more months, according to the most recent notice, which means approximately seven months given the pattern established so far. When it is done, I will have new neighbours, whose presence I will probably notice less than the construction that preceded them, which is the correct outcome: neighbours are less disruptive than building sites, and new residents are part of the neighbourhood rather than an imposition on it. I will miss knowing the rhythm of the working week. I will not miss the dust. The temporary traffic lights will come down, eventually. I am learning to trust this.
For more from Harper-Thames on Shoreditch life, visit Harper-Thames. More on London neighbourhoods at Londonist.
I want to make a final observation about living next to a building site, which is this: the end of a building site is also a kind of loss. The rhythms that have organised my days for eighteen months will stop, and the silence that follows will be a different silence from the silence that preceded the construction, because I will know what was there and what has replaced it. The new building will eventually become just the building, unremarkable, present, the way all buildings become once they have been there long enough. But for a while, I will see through it to the process that produced it, and that process will be part of what the neighbourhood is to me in a way it is not to anyone who arrived after it was done.
The building next door will be finished and I will have neighbours I have never spoken to, and we will begin the process of being adjacent to each other in the particular way that city living involves: aware of each other, occasionally sharing a wall, coexisting without contact for weeks and then suddenly, over a shared postman or a misdirected parcel or a note about something trivial, having a conversation that makes the wall between us feel thinner. This is how city neighbourhoods work. I have been through this process before. The building site is the transition, not the arrival. I am waiting for the arrival.
The building site noise has, over eighteen months, become a kind of white noise that I no longer consciously register. I noticed this absence of noticing last week when a particularly loud drill broke through it, and I thought: I must be acclimatised. Acclimatisation is the undersung human capacity. We adjust to almost anything, eventually, and the adjustment happens without our permission or awareness.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
