I live on a fairly friendly housing estate, but there are still many neighbours I haven't met. Sometimes you need mechanisms, and activities, to bring people together. We have started up a project to grow food in dumpy bags on an unused drying area on the estate. The soil and manure arrived early on Friday morning, and I decided to get started filling the bags. When one of my neighbours saw me wrestling with a wheelbarrow and a tonne of manure on my own, he offered to help, and between us we made light work of filling two bags. In return for his help I was able to get a longstanding problem with his TV aerial fixed, by emailing a contact at Hackney Homes (my neighbour had long since given up after being fobbed off so many times.)

Then another man on the estate, a Turkish man who doesn't speak much English, turned up with his young son to fill his bag. Meanwhile I had told my immediate neighbour about the project and he was keen to join in. Since it is easier for two people to fill a bag, I suggested they both work together, which they did, despite the language problem. It was lovely to see two neighbours who had never met work together, and at the end we all shook hands. It felt like the project had already delivered results, before any vegetables have even been planted!