Beware of the Dog

It was a knock down of a big old Victorian place and we were building a couple of smaller timber frame houses on the site. The bloke next door had objected to planning and lost, so he wasn't all that happy about it. We got on with him OK but he had it in for the developer. He wanted to screw up the developers chances of a sale so he got a pot of white paint and wrote 'Millwall FC' in big letters on his own shed roof. The shed overlooked the gardens of the new places so anyone coming to view was going to see it and wonder about what kind of neighbours they would have.

For good measure he also got a union jack and stuck that up in his back garden and he got a sign with a picture of a Rottweiler saying 'I live here' and put it on his front gate. He didn't’t even have a dog but it looked like a real dodgy geezer was living there. It did the trick and all these people came along and took one look and never put in an offer. The developer had the right hump. Well you would. He was reckoning that this was knocking £50,000 off the price and he went round and had a go at the neighbour.

So the neighbour said "Give me fifty grand for the loss in value on my house since you built these f****** rabbit hutches so close and I will rub out the graffiti and take the flag and sign down". The developer wasn't gonna do that because it was giving in to intimidation, so they toughed it out for a few months. In the end a sold sign went up on the one nearest to the angry neighbour and the neighbour couldn't believe the sale would go through.

When the new bloke moved in he had three Dobermans and it turns out on the back of his 4x4 was a Millwall supporters sticker, so he must have looked at this set up and thought he had found his spiritual home. He even put a union jack up in his garden because he didn't’t want no foreigners moving into the other house.