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Home and neighbourhood
Pandemic geographies of dwelling and belonging

The home has been at the forefront of political and public health responses to, and people’s lives during, the COVID-19 pandemic. National directives in many countries to ‘stay home’, alongside border closures and other restrictions, limited local and transnational mobility to an unprecedented extent. In the UK, there were three periods of nationwide lockdown in 2020 (March‒May; November‒December) and 2021 (January‒March) where the majority of the population faced significant limitations on leaving places of residence. People experienced the impact of the universal directive to ‘stay home’ in very different ways, as explored by a growing body of research on home and everyday life during the pandemic. Across this wide-ranging and growing field of research on home and COVID-19, new forms of connection and disconnection with people and places beyond the household and the domestic dwelling have emerged as important themes. Drawing on research conducted as part of the AHRC-funded Stay Home Stories project (www.stayhomestories.co.uk), and informed by wider research on ‘home-city geographies’, this chapter explores pandemic geographies of dwelling and belonging on the domestic and neighbourhood scales for UK residents in London and Liverpool. Throughout, we argue that the home – porous and bounded, expansive and confined – is a site of pandemic dis/connection with the wider neighbourhood. Homes and neighbourhoods were formative in shaping people’s lived experiences of COVID-19 and visions for the future of both should be a central part of local and national pandemic recovery agendas.

The home has been at the forefront of political and public health responses to, and people’s lives during, the COVID-19 pandemic. National directives in many countries to ‘stay home’, alongside border closures and other restrictions, limited local and transnational mobility to an unprecedented extent (Blunt and Dowling, 2022; Fitzgerald, 2020). In the UK there were three periods of nationwide lockdown in 2020 (March–May, November–December) and 2021 (January–March) when the majority of the population faced significant limitations on leaving their places of residence (see Institute for Government, 2022, for full details of lockdowns and other forms of restriction across the UK and its devolved nations). People experienced the impact of the universal directive to ‘stay home’ in very different ways, as explored by a growing body of research on home and everyday life during the pandemic that spans critiques of the limited and exclusionary assumptions about home, household and family (Grewal et al., 2020; Sophie Lewis, 2020); home-working and home-schooling (Aznar et al., 2021; Dimopoulos et al., 2021; Islam, 2022); the rise of domestic violence and abuse (Piquero et al., 2021; Women’s Aid, 2020); the impact of the pandemic on migrant domestic workers (Pandey et al., 2021; Rao et al., 2021); digital connectivity in the home (Maalsen and Dowling, 2020); the effects of housing precarity and design on mental health, wellbeing and domestic life (Alonso and Jacoby, 2023; Bower et al., 2023; Erfani and Bahrami, 2023; Preece et al., 2023; Waldron, 2023); and religious faith and practice at home during the pandemic (Bryson et al., 2020; Lawrence et al., 2022).

Across this wide-ranging and growing field of research on home and COVID-19, new forms of connection and disconnection with people and places beyond the household and the domestic dwelling have emerged as important themes. Drawing on research conducted as part of the AHRC-funded Stay Home Stories project (www.stayhomestories.co.uk), and informed by wider research on what Blunt and Sheringham (2019) term ‘home-city geographies’, this chapter explores pandemic geographies of dwelling and belonging on domestic and neighbourhood scales for UK residents in London and Liverpool. In so doing, it extends broader debates about urban homes as sites of dis/connection with the wider neighbourhood (Sheringham et al., 2023) and interactions with neighbours and neighbourhoods during the COVID-19 pandemic (Mehta, 2020; Ottoni et al., 2022; Preece et al., 2023). In this chapter we address three key questions: how were people’s ‘stay home’ lives shaped by interactions with their neighbours and neighbourhoods? How did such interactions shape people’s pandemic experiences of dwelling and belonging on domestic and neighbourhood scales? What insights can we take forward to shape fairer home-city futures? Throughout, we argue that the home – porous and bounded, expansive and confined – is a site of pandemic dis/connection with the wider neighbourhood. Homes and neighbourhoods were formative in shaping people’s lived experiences of COVID-19 and visions for the future of both should be a central part of local and national pandemic recovery agendas. We begin by situating our research within wider debates about urban homes and neighbourhoods.

Urban homes and neighbourhoods

Through their analysis of a series of pre-pandemic ‘home-city biographies’ with residents in Hackney, east London, Sheringham et al. (2023) argue that home is a site of connection and disconnection with the wider urban neighbourhood and city. By taking a ‘home-city geographies’ approach, which explores the connections between urban domesticities (home in the city) and domestic urbanism (the city as home), they draw attention ‘to the importance of people’s domestic lives in their sense of belonging (or not belonging) to the neighbourhood and wider city’, highlighting ‘the role of urban encounters – with immediate neighbours and in the wider neighbourhood – in people’s experiences of home, which may involve a feeling of isolation from, or of being part of, something larger’ (Sheringham et al., 2023: 733; see also Blunt and Sheringham, 2019; Burrell, 2014). By foregrounding the intertwined geographies of home, neighbourhood and the wider city, Sheringham et al. (2023) develop broader debates about urban conviviality, the contested domestication of urban space and neighbourly and neighbourhood interactions. In contrast to research that explores living together in the city largely, and often exclusively, in relation to ‘lives lived in urban public space’ (2023: 722), Sheringham et al. argue that it is

only by taking seriously the practices, experiences and imaginings of home as a site of connection and/or disconnection with neighbours, neighbourhoods, and the wider city that … urban scholars can gain a full picture of what it means to live together in the city, and to understand some of the inequalities, exclusions and prejudices that shape urban lives. (Sheringham et al., 2023: 719)

Sheringham et al. further stress the temporal dynamics of dis/connections between home and the urban neighbourhood, whereby ‘the experiences and narratives of home in the city, and the city as home, ebb and flow over time’ (2023: 733), bound up with personal, familial and household changes over the life course, alongside wider processes of urban change (Blunt et al., 2020). From March 2020, ‘stay home’ directives and other restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and many other countries marked a significant and unprecedented disjuncture in the interplay of personal and urban temporalities. Three national lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – and other periods of restriction, including in the north east and north west of England from August to October 2020 and via tiered systems across the UK – not only limited contact with people beyond the household – or, from June 2020, beyond a household ‘bubble’ for people living alone or single parents – but also limited the amount of time that most people, except key workers, could spend outside their homes (Institute for Government, 2022). Alongside travel restrictions within and beyond the UK, this meant that people spent a far greater amount of time within their local neighbourhoods.

Writing at an early point in the pandemic, Vikas Mehta explored what he termed ‘the new proxemics’, whereby people – particularly those living in mid-to low-density places – were ‘experiencing their neighbourhoods differently’ (2020: 669). While recognising stark social disparities, Mehta wrote that ‘social distancing has delivered, in many neighbourhoods, a new and sociable space’ (2020: 669), reflecting a wider desire under tight restrictions for ‘the publicness of the everyday – socializing, conversations and other interactions with our neighbours and others’ (Mehta, 2020: 670). Alongside quantitative research on the spatial and social disparities in the decline of activities at the neighbourhood scale during the pandemic and its impact on rates of infection (Trasberg and Cheshire, 2023), other research has explored people’s lived experiences of neighbourhoods and their relationships with their neighbours. Ottoni et al. (2022), for example, analyse interviews conducted with older residents in Vancouver from March to June 2020 to explore the importance of ‘social connectedness’, both with neighbours in their apartment buildings and in their wider neighbourhood. Recognising the impact of ‘unneighbourliness’ on the ‘unmaking of home’ (Baxter and Brickell, 2014; Cheshire et al., 2021), Preece et al. (2023: 1658) explain that ‘close proximity to others demonstrates how the practices of one neighbour can impede the home-making of another’, particularly through noise (also see Alonso and Jacoby, 2023). Within the neighbourhood, many researchers have stressed the importance of access to domestic and public green spaces during the pandemic for mental and physical health and wellbeing, particularly for people living in overcrowded and sub-standard housing (Burnett et al., 2021; Dobson, 2021; Erfani and Bahrami, 2023; Foster, 2020; and Mell and Whitten, 2021), while recognising the unevenness of access to them, due in part to park closures at the start of the first national lockdown (Blunt et al., 2022; Foster, 2020). This chapter contributes to this wider research through its focus on both home and neighbourhood, and the encounters with neighbours that played a significant part in deepening or limiting experiences of the neighbourhood as home during the height of the pandemic. By bringing pre-pandemic work on home-city dis/connections into dialogue with research on neighbourhoods and neighbourly interactions during the pandemic, we seek to ‘know the pandemic’ by understanding people’s ‘stay home’ lives and their ideas about home on domestic, neighbourhood and urban scales. To do so, we draw on interviews conducted in London and Liverpool as part of the Stay Home Stories project.

Stay Home Stories

Stay Home Stories is a collaborative research project based at the Centre for Studies of Home, a partnership between Queen Mary University of London and Museum of the Home, and conducted with the University of Liverpool, the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and National Museums Liverpool. The research project had three main aims: first, to document and analyse the ways in which home has been mobilised, experienced and imagined during and after three UK national lockdowns; to explore and extend creative and curatorial work that documents diverse experiences and imaginings of home; and to understand how practices, spaces and meanings of home have changed during and after lockdown, particularly for adults from different ethnic, migration and faith backgrounds and for children and young people. The research has involved more than 100 online interviews with adults living in London and Liverpool – two cities with particularly high rates of COVID-19 at different times in the pandemic (see Blunt et al., 2022; Burrell et al., 2021) – as well as the analysis of more than 400 maps of home during the pandemic drawn by children and young people aged 7 to 16 throughout the UK. Project outputs – all available at www.stayhomestories.co.uk – include reports on home and COVID-19 in London and Liverpool (Blunt et al., 2022; Burrell et al., 2021); a report on the impact of the pandemic on artists (Nightingale et al., 2022); a resource guide for people of faith (Lawrence et al., 2022); a series of short films and podcasts; teaching resources; and blog posts. We include two maps from our research in this chapter, and more can be seen in an online gallery (www.rgs.org/schools/projects-and-partnerships/stay-home-rethinking-the-domestic-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/mapping-home) hosted by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

Aged between 18 and 73, our interviewees came from a wide range of ethnic, migration and faith backgrounds, and worked in a variety of sectors. Some worked from home during the pandemic or were on a temporary absence from work under the furlough scheme, while others, including key workers, continued to work beyond the home. Some participants have lived in London or Liverpool for all or most of their lives, while others have moved there more recently. Participants lived in a variety of housing types (terraced, semi-detached and detached houses; flats; and student accommodation), tenures (social housing, rented and privately owned accommodation) and households (alone, with family members, or in shared accommodation with friends or flat-mates). Many of our participants were recruited and interviewed by community researchers working on the project in Liverpool and east London, as well as by other members of the project team. Reflecting the wider research aims, interview questions spanned a range of topics including: changes to people’s households and domestic practices during COVID-19; relationships with family and friends; experiences of being and feeling at home in the local neighbourhood; migrant homes in pandemic times; and the impacts of coronavirus restrictions on religious belief and practice.

Pandemic homes and neighbourhoods

Local neighbourhoods came to be increasingly significant for many of our interviewees during the pandemic, particularly during periods of lockdown.1 Alexandra describes, for example, her experience of living in Liverpool shrinking to her neighbourhood when, after a few bike rides to the city centre early in the first lockdown, she remained closer to home:

[T]‌he city has felt much smaller, for sure … my world has felt really small … there is a sense of living in a village… I don’t live in a city at the moment. I haven’t lived in the city for a while. It’s quite a small village that I live in.

Even as her everyday life in the city became more localised, Alexandra describes her growing identification of Liverpool as home during the pandemic, mainly because she chose to remain there rather than return to Athens to work remotely:

I think it was during the pandemic that I realised Liverpool is home… I know quite a few people that live in the UK mainly and they went back to Athens during the pandemic. And because being able to work from anywhere, just gives you the option. And I really wanted to go last summer and spend a lot of time there. But … it makes me realise that it’s here, like that’s where I am. That’s where home is and I’m not here because of work … I choose to be here. So, I think that’s the main thing that changed during the pandemic, like this question of where home is was resolved … by making this choice of where to be, where you have the option to be. To be isolated, to be stuck at the place. Where do you choose to be stuck?

For Alexandra, this wider sense of Liverpool as home was rooted in her neighbourhood:

[T]‌his area of Liverpool, from Sefton Park to Toxteth is – that’s where home is… [T]hat has been clear to me when I say Liverpool is home, which part of Liverpool I mean. And the country? I can’t say that like England is home or the UK. So, it’s very localised. It’s Liverpool

(see also Blunt and Bonnerjee (2013) and Bonnerjee (2012) on diasporic attachments to cities and neighbourhoods as home).

Many people described how their relationships with local places and communities became stronger during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cuong, for example, moved to Woolwich in London shortly before lockdown and began to view his neighbourhood as a place to ‘live a bit more’ rather than ‘a place to store clothes and sleep’. Julie valued her Tower Hamlets neighbourhood in London for its diversity and inclusivity: ‘everybody feels when they’re here they belong here, and that’s great because it’s very inclusive of everybody and that’s the best thing about it…. I think it’s one of the few places in the world where people always feel at home … wherever they’re from.’ She also appreciated its amenities and connections to other places in the city:

Although I’m in the heart of the city or the heart of London, I’m also next to quite rural spaces like the City Farm, Allen Gardens and other sort[s]‌ of local parks. I have really good facilities for transport near me so it’s easy to get to, also I’ve got local high streets near me all in walking distance… So it’s very connected, and I think this is one of the reasons why lots of people come to live here … because it’s one of the most really connected places.

Farah, who had moved to Walthamstow in London before the pandemic, felt more rooted in her neighbourhood and local community:

I definitely grew to like my neighbourhood much, much more, because … when I moved to this neighbourhood I thought … I don’t know anything about it… But during the pandemic I realised like I made it home here and I really want to stay here, because I really liked the general community, and liked the approach to community.

But while many people felt more strongly rooted in their neighbourhoods and local communities during the pandemic, others felt increasingly disconnected. Miriam, for example, felt that both her house and Liverpool were home, alongside where her parents and other family members live in Spain, but missed a sense of community in her neighbourhood and felt lonely and isolated during the pandemic:

It’s a really nice area with nice views and that, but there is no sense of community at all. Because we have just some … big blocks, lots of hotels and office spaces. So there is not local shops that are close. There is not a local market, there is not a local park. There is not a space for neighbours to be together really… I would prefer to live in an area with a greater sense of community, definitely. I think it’s more rewarding. It makes you feel more integrated in society really. I felt really, really lonely during lockdown. I felt really lonely. And if I had had more friends or closer neighbours, that wouldn’t have been … so bad for me… I felt if something happened to me, nobody would realise or nobody would come. I mean my family is in Spain so they couldn’t fly. I couldn’t go there… It’s funny how the house was suddenly like too small. I’m always ok there and suddenly the house was too small. And I was lonely, and I’m always alone and I love it.

While Miriam had previously enjoyed living alone, her lack of local friends, neighbours and wider sense of community made her feel isolated and vulnerable during pandemic restrictions. She experienced loneliness not only on a domestic scale but also in relation to her wider neighbourhood. Her experiences are revealing of the limitations of public health ‘stay home’ directives, which appear predicated on particular assumptions about domestic relations and urban sociality that are not achievable for everyone. As Sheringham et al. observe, ‘While the literature on urban conviviality focuses on living together in urban public space, much of the literature on loneliness focuses on people living alone and emphasizes household rather than home’, obscuring ‘a broader understanding of the multiple material and social factors that contribute to the experience of feeling at home or not at home’, including those beyond the domestic dwelling from neighbourhood to transnational scales (Sheringham et al., 2023: 723). Alongside her loneliness within her home and neighbourhood, Miriam, like many other participants with family and friends in other countries, also found international travel restrictions very difficult:

[I]‌t was disturbing, the idea of not being able to fly if needed from one home to the other one. Because I mean Liverpool is my home, but I know I can take a flight whenever I need it and be here [in Spain] in a couple of hours. And the idea of not being able to do it was really disturbing (also see Burrell et al., 2021).

Other participants reflected on the relationships between their homes and neighbourhoods in different ways. Salma, for example, described her sense of home as wherever she was with her fiancé, dog and cat, but found that during periods of lockdown and other restrictions,

I had a difficult relationship with home because this is home, but … I felt trapped a lot of the time … home didn’t feel like a comfortable space anymore … home felt forced and I felt like I was trapped a lot of the time, and I felt like I couldn’t go out … everything felt really restrictive, even though … you could go on a walk. So it wasn’t like I was completely trapped in a house, but I felt trapped in my little place… I did feel like I was at home, but I didn’t feel like it was comforting.

Salma’s experiences of home – vividly conveyed through her reiteration of feeling ‘trapped’ – were closely bound up with the limitations of her Liverpool neighbourhood as a place to live during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, Salma and her fiancé had moved to a neighbourhood with good transport connections because travelling had been an important part of their work:

Although the neighbourhood is not a bad neighbourhood in particular, there are definitely better neighbourhoods I think that we could have selected based on being at home more. So when we bought this house, we picked it based on our career trajectories at that point … it did what it needed to do, but then when we did go into lockdown … I remember saying to my fiancé I wish we had a bigger garden or I wish we had more space or I wish we lived … closer to a shop. Because where we live, we have to drive to a shop, there is nowhere, I think there’s a corner shop about a mile and a half away, but literally there isn’t anything really … it’s quite enclosed. There are just houses here and there’s a motorway just sort of down the road-ish.

Salma and many other participants talked about the importance of gardens, parks and other outdoor spaces to sustain them during lockdowns and other restrictions. While access to private and shared gardens helped people cope with the restrictions of lockdown on a domestic scale, access to local parks and other outside spaces were crucial in helping people to feel more at home in their wider neighbourhood (also see Vertovec (2015), on urban ‘rooms without walls’, including parks, in New York, Singapore and Johannesburg). Local parks and other outside spaces took on an enhanced significance in many people’s lives, not least because they offered, as one participant put it, a break from ‘being confined inside’ and ‘just something different than being [inside] … the same four walls again’. In research conducted before the pandemic, Sheringham et al. (2023) describe the importance of views from windows, doors and balconies in understanding residents’ connections between their home and urban neighbourhood. Views of – as well as access to – green space and water were particularly important during lockdown restrictions.

For Miriam, who felt lonely and isolated in her home and neighbourhood, having a terrace (on a balcony) was a crucial way of feeling connected to nature and the outdoors during lockdown:

I think my outdoor space, my terrace, is definitely more valued than ever. No, no, it’s always been an important part of the house and I didn’t realise. Because I have really big glass windows. So even if I’m working all day, because I can have a look at the outside world, it’s also really relaxing because I have water, there’s this lake, I have birds and stuff. I can see the sunset. So it feels like I am outside. So sometimes I will spend three or four days at home without realising that I haven’t been out.

Living near Liverpool’s waterfront was important for Luis who moved to the city from Malta:

We’re Mediterraneans and we come from an island, and we’re used to seeing and living by the water. And that is, at least to me, comforting … from my living room, I can see water and I can see the docks, and I can see the river, and I can see the tide. And also, if I walk, if I get out of the house, I’m immediately by the water, although it’s a different type of water than, you know, Mediterranean waters, but it’s still satisfying in a way and then we go for walks along the waterfront.

The importance of green spaces beyond the home was also a prominent theme in the maps drawn by children and young people. Niccolo’s map of home in London during the pandemic (Figure 4.1), for example, focuses predominantly on places beyond the home – including shops, school and a church – and places particular emphasis on parks, the River Thames, trees and wildlife. His house is positioned centrally amidst these different features of the local neighbourhood, but the map focuses more on what is beyond the house than what is inside, highlighting the importance of urban green-blue spaces. Parks were also important for Aurelius, whose map features a church, school and restaurant as out of bounds and shrouded with cloud and rain, compared with the sunshine over Richmond Park, Bishop’s Park and Ravenscourt Park (see Figure 4.2; also see the film My Place, My Space [2021], co-produced by Stay Home Stories and Write Back, a charity working with young people in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham).

Alongside the importance of being able to see the world beyond the home – and the importance of views of the natural world described by Miriam and Luis – participants also described getting to know and valuing parks and other green spaces more than before. Alexandra, for example, felt ‘more ownership of the park’, while Magda vividly conveyed her deep attachment to Sefton Park in Liverpool through her daily walks:

I think that I know every nook and cranny of Sefton Park… I became really, really appreciative of that space, and almost kind of started approaching it a little bit more mindfully, I guess, than before. I kind of took it a little bit for granted… I started bird watching in those parks… I’ve also learned to recognise loads of plants, which I don’t think I was able to do before the lockdown… I definitely became mindful of that and I started walking every day.

Our participants – both those with and without access to private or shared gardens – went to parks more frequently and for many reasons: for exercise and fresh air, respite and relaxation, to appreciate nature and for forms of social interaction (also see Burnett et al., 2021). Many, like Em in London, valued visiting parks to pass time, cope with the different pace of life during the pandemic and maintain good mental health:

I definitely spent a lot of time, a lot, lot, lot more time in my local park. Like there is a whole section of my camera roll which is just filled with images … just filled with pictures of the wildlife and the skies at different times of day… And actually I do find – I’ve been looking back through the pictures that I took in the summer lockdown compared to the winter lockdown, and … charting how the seasons changed throughout the year and … also my emotions along with it because that November lockdown was like just something else … that park and those green spaces definitely, definitely became a sanctuary (also see Nightingale et al., 2022 on how artists engaged in new ways with local green spaces).

Yet access to such spaces was far from equal. In the early phases of the pandemic, many parks, such as Victoria Park in east London, were closed because of concerns about social gathering and virus transmission, leaving those without private gardens with limited options to enjoy the supposed benefits of green space. Analysis conducted in London in April 2020 claimed that people in deprived areas and those from BAME backgrounds were negatively and disproportionately affected by these park closures (Duncan et al., 2020). But even when opened, not all groups – including those of certain ages, genders, abilities or who are racially minoritised – could navigate parks and green spaces with ease and without fear of discrimination or hostility (Foster, 2020).

In this section we have focused on the ways in which our participants understood and described their sense of home in relation to a wider sense of dwelling and belonging – or not belonging – in their wider neighbourhood, and the importance of neighbourhood green-blue space in pandemic times. While their insights were mostly positive, experiences during the pandemic raise important questions about spatial inclusion and environmental justice in cities, and especially the future significance of providing green-blue space for human wellbeing (Dobson, 2021). We now turn to the ways in which neighbourly interactions also shaped pandemic experiences of both home and neighbourhood.

Neighbourly interactions

As Sheringham et al. (2023: 722) explain, a wide range of research ‘explores “neighbouring” and “neighbourliness” and challenges theories of neighbourhood “disassociation” due to increased privatization and mobility’. This includes analysis of ‘the negotiation of privacy and sociability’ (Crow et al., 2002: 127); studies on the relative strengths and weaknesses of ties that underpin a sense of community, belonging and/or disaster resilience (Blokland and Nast, 2014; Cheshire, 2015; Felder, 2020; Redshaw and Ingham, 2018); and work on the importance of understanding the sensory dimensions of neighbourly relations (Camilla Lewis, 2020). Building on Sheringham et al.’s (2023) focus on neighbourly encounters within and beyond urban homes and neighbourhoods before the pandemic, we consider the ways in which neighbourly interactions shaped understandings and experiences of pandemic homes and neighbourhoods.

While streets and neighbourhoods felt emptier and more isolated, especially during the first UK lockdown (March–May 2020), our interviews revealed the ways in which neighbourliness itself endured and reshaped. As Leonora from Liverpool told us:

Gradually, people got, you know, a bit more comfortable popping their heads out … talking at the doors. I think the closest we came to – everybody came to being near each other was when they were doing the clapping for the NHS when that phase was going on. So, that was a moment where everybody came out to share … people were clapping for the NHS, but I think it was also a need for people to see each other and just have that response to each other. You’d see your neighbour across the road, and you’d be, ‘Hi’. And waving and smiling. It was so nice to meet someone to smile at and wave to and make that connection, even if it was at a distance because it kind of brought the street alive again, you know, where it’s been dead for weeks.

But the possibility for such moments of neighbourly connection depended in part on where people lived. For Luke, also in Liverpool, urban sociality took on a different geography during the pandemic:

[T]‌he locality itself felt very kind of weirdly isolated. Like all of the back streets that are normally quieter became louder, and our street, which is normally very loud, became really eerie and really deserted. And you couldn’t really hear anyone, so that almost felt like a little bit isolating. Like when there was clap[ping] for carers, we couldn’t really hear anyone clapping on our street because everyone moved out. But all of the back streets were full of people.

Many interviewees agreed that people had started greeting neighbours more often and appreciating day-to-day social encounters more than before lockdown. For Sheila, for example, who lives in Liverpool,

I do feel that … l like the neighbourhood, I feel like people do speak to each other more in the streets. And, you know, it’s just those chats at, like, supermarkets or the corner shop or just bumping into someone in the street that have changed a bit. And there is sort of, like, a little bit more small talk. Just more saying ‘hi’, and stuff like that, which definitely wasn’t the case before.

Elizabeth, who lives in Finsbury Park in north London where she was born and grew up, also valued seeing and talking to people locally:

The highlight of your day [was] going to the supermarket because then you’d see some people, even though they were all in these masks and you were keeping away from them, it was quite nice. And sometimes you’d … bump into people and have chats with people in the street that you hadn’t spoken to, or people a couple of times came up to me … and said ‘Oh, we used to play with you, we used to play together when we were little’.

Similarly reflecting the importance of shops as places of connection with other people, Em described feeling ‘far more acquainted with the local butchers and greengrocers’ in her south London neighbourhood and the importance of seeing other people: ‘what was really nice as well is seeing people in shops and, even though we weren’t necessarily talking, it still felt like some sort of … a human connection’. This point was echoed by Selin who lives on the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, and appreciated the open space close to home more than before:

I don’t think previously we would go for a walk in our neighbourhood so much. … We discovered bits of the neighbourhood that we previously didn’t necessarily know about and then started going to those places more often and that has carried on since the lockdown has been eased… We used to take our daughter out for walks and then we ended up actually meeting a lot of people in the neighbourhood … we kept on running into each other … meeting new people or running into neighbours that we didn’t necessarily know that well. But I think everyone was so eager to connect with each other in the absence of any other sort of social interaction it … as a neighbourhood we came together quite a bit.

When parks were open, they also served as important public sites of neighbourhood encounter during the pandemic (see Blunt et al., 2022 and Foster, 2020 on park closures during the first lockdown). Even if direct engagement with other people was limited or not allowed, witnessing others dealing with the challenges of restriction and isolation was, for some of our participants, important in validating a sense of the pandemic as a shared experience. New forms of neighbourly interaction became important in helping many people feel more connected with each other during the pandemic through seeing, hearing and talking to each other. Moreover, lockdown and other restrictions meant that for many people, neighbourhood spaces, and particularly parks, enabled them to connect with family members beyond their household or ‘bubble’. Saba, for example, spoke about how Sefton Park in Liverpool helped her to stay close to her father, uniting them in new shared daily routines which became vital in later helping her recover from the virus:

When we were allowed to go for walks with somebody from another household, me and my Dad set up this … we’d walk round Sefton Park every day, me and him, and that was brilliant … because my Dad is staunch, he’s like, ‘it’s just a bit of rain’, I would be soaked to the skin, I’d be freezing. And he’d be like, ‘you don’t have to come love, you don’t have to’, but then I just knew. And we did it, we did it solid, we did it solid until – and it was mostly because when I got the COVID I got it really bad, it really knocked me for six, it took me quite a while to recover… When it came to … getting over the COVID and stuff, I wasn’t really that strong enough, so he was like, ‘come on, let’s go to the park’… It was almost like he was trying to help me on my road to recovery and I was also taking it as an opportunity to bond with him as well, so we’d have the best conversations.

As well as family relationships and friendships, the pandemic revealed the importance of neighbourhood relationships and community support. Winne, for example, found that her building’s WhatsApp group ‘creates a very nice kind of community spirit … looking after each other or what kind of problems we’re encountering’. Julie valued the support of neighbours who delivered food to her doorstep when she was isolating with COVID-19. For some participants who had migrated to London or Liverpool, opportunities for local connection strengthened their sense of the neighbourhood and community as home. As Farah explained, for example,

I really loved the community around which made me feel like with all the mutual aid things, like neighbours helping each other … I think that made me feel like … I do feel like a part of a community, and it does feel like home, and made me also think like home is more like a feeling than like a place.

Community organisations and faith groups played significant roles in providing neighbourly contact and support for local people. Saba, for example, spoke about the role of her Liverpool mosque in keeping people together:

If a tragedy happens or an adversity happens or something good happens, your faith comes in – kicks in, you know, in one way or another… So the mosque set up a support group to – for all of its congregation in a WhatsApp group so they can keep an eye on each other, they also looked after their neighbours whether they were Muslim or non-Muslim… When COVID happened, because everybody had to pull together, like we knew exactly what the Pakistani community were doing, what the Caribbean community were doing, what that mosque was doing, what the Somali associations were doing, we all got to hear what was going on in the community… People would go out in the middle of the night to get somebody nappies, you know, or … our neighbours are all on a WhatsApp group so it was just like somebody needed paracetamol or could somebody pick up an extra bottle of milk, it was – it was so lovely (also see Lawrence et al., 2022 for more on the role of faith groups and leaders during the pandemic).

While community- and faith-led initiatives provided an important source of care and support during the pandemic and helped people to feel anchored in their neighbourhood, they have often developed in the absence of state provision and because of longstanding inequalities that were further deepened during the pandemic. Julie, for example, who volunteered at a food bank in Tower Hamlets throughout the pandemic, described how inadequate state responses to COVID-19 exacerbated existing problems of poverty and austerity:

Even before the pandemic … because of austerity and poverty really … lots of local people have needed the food bank, and that’s increased over the pandemic … and not having resources to support them has meant that they have had to rely on mutual aid and community support … and I think one of the good things is that we’ve all found ways to either be supported or support people in our communities whenever there’s been need.

While some people talked to their neighbours more than before, others found it hard to do so. Not everyone felt at home in their neighbourhood or that their local urban community was necessarily constructed for, or welcoming of, people like them. Frances, for example, described feeling unable to connect with neighbours, beyond helping one with their internet connection: ‘I’ve been thinking about how, if I hadn’t been stuck in my fear, I might have reached out more … [my] confidence went even lower … during the pandemic’. As Frances explained, ‘I’m still in denial about living here … and there’s always a fear as well about being trans, which is like if you talk to people then they might turn out to be an ally, but they might not and then they’ll know too much about you’ (see Choi, 2013, on the meaning of home for transgendered people). For Miriam, who felt lonely in her home and neighbourhood in Liverpool,

I thought that there would be a greater sense of community. But no, there was no communications with neighbours … my neighbours can be … shy or whatever… I say hello, they never say hello back, and that didn’t change in lockdown. I thought they would want to create a greater sense of community or at least familiarity, but that didn’t happen. So my only contact is with a friend of mine that lives in the building next door, and that didn’t change.

While new forms of encounter and conviviality – often on doorsteps or streets close to home, as well as in shops and parks – provided important points of connection for many people, the neighbourhood was hostile and exclusionary for others (see Blunt et al., 2022 for further discussion about the impact of race, ethnicity and immigration status on people during the pandemic). The pandemic took hold in a society where racism was already systemic and heightened racial suspicion and abuse circulated, online and offline. Rogelio, who moved to the UK from the Philippines in 2018, described the ‘temporary’ nature of London and distinguished between ‘home’ and a ‘dwelling place’: ‘[I]‌t’s a dwelling place. It’s not home. It’s a dwelling place. It’s a provisional space where I can put my body. It’s nothing permanent [because of] the dominant culture of disdain for migrants, or suspicion for migrants and people of colour in this country’. He spoke about ‘a weird perception that … people of colour are the ones who brought the COVID here’, a racialised narrative of contagion and the governance of infectious disease that has deep historical roots (Mallapragada, 2021; White, 2023). Francis was afraid to leave his house because of ‘corona racism’, and Meilin and Youngsook spoke about anti-Asian sentiment directly, with Meilin recalling a frightening encounter by the canal while out jogging. In Youngsook’s words,

When the pandemic started, apparently, even before the spread in the UK started, there was a huge anti-China, anti-Asian racism. I mean, it was so tense. I experienced it everywhere basically, no one wants to sit next to me. It was really visible, it was [a]‌ subtle but visible kind of aggression everyday (also see Reny and Barreto, 2022; Yunpeng, 2020).

Like Rogelio, Youngsook described London as a ‘transitional city’, with many residents not in a position to see it as ‘their permanent home ground’. While Youngsook felt that she hadn’t belonged in London before she moved back to South Korea, she felt more at home once she moved to Hackney on her return, in large part by building a community within the Asian diaspora and with other creative practitioners:

It creates a sense of home but also it gives you power – it gives you resilience power… You have a power to be resilient against any problems directing to this community. I think that that really helps to build a sense of home or making home … it’s both ways, it’s not just inward way, it’s also outward way. How can you be strong in who you are and with your culture in this world? … To be able to be who I am with the non-Asian people, that I want to coexist together, I need to have the strength and resilience.

Neighbourly interactions shaped how our participants felt about their sense of home and belonging both on domestic and neighbourhood scales, with some feeling a greater sense of connectedness than before the pandemic, while others felt increasingly isolated or excluded. The reasons for such differences were attributed to the nature of the neighbourhood, the presence or absence of a sense of community and experiences of racism in a hostile environment, particularly experienced by people of East Asian heritage. In each case, however, people’s experiences of home and neighbourhood during the pandemic – whether positive, negative or a mix of the two – were closely bound together.

Conclusion: fairer home-city futures?

While ‘stay home’ directives in the UK sought to confine people to their homes to limit the spread of COVID-19 and protect the National Health Service (NHS), people’s experiences of home during the pandemic were closely shaped by the spaces of the wider neighbourhood, their neighbourly interactions, sense of community and the physical dwelling in which they lived. Rather than seeing home as a fixed and bounded space separate from the neighbourhood, city and world beyond, people’s pandemic experiences reveal that, even at its most confined, home is shaped by connections with people beyond the household and places beyond the domestic dwelling. The ‘stay home stories’ we have discussed in this chapter resonate with wider ideas about ‘home-city geographies’ (Blunt and Sheringham, 2019) and research undertaken prior to the pandemic on the home as a site of dis/connection within urban neighbourhoods (Sheringham et al., 2023). However, they do so in heightened ways, notably through, first, a new appreciation for, or concern about, the wider neighbourhood, particularly its parks and other green-blue spaces; and, second, more regular encounters and connections with, or a greater sense of disconnection and isolation from, neighbours and local communities.

Our research has demonstrated the deep inequalities that not only shaped people’s experiences of, but were also further entrenched by, the COVID-19 pandemic (for further evidence of these inequalities, see Blunt et al., 2022 and Burrell et al., 2021). We end by drawing out some key insights from this chapter and our wider research to inform pandemic recovery agendas on local and national scales that seek to make homes and neighbourhoods fairer and more liveable for all. We recognise that significant structural change, a different political environment and a new vision of cities would be required for these agendas to be fully advanced, but take advantage of the rupture that a global pandemic has brought to imagine a different future.

Our work has shown that understanding people’s home lives – and their sense of home beyond as well as within the household and/or domestic dwelling – should be at the heart of future urban place-making and neighbourhood planning. This connects closely with the need to address long-term housing inequality and precarity in the UK in cities like London and Liverpool; and the importance of prioritising adequate space for home-working and access to domestic and/or neighbourhood green space in future housing policies and housing developments. Indeed, the pandemic has emphasised that green spaces are vital for wellbeing, social connection and belonging. Access to such spaces should become more central to policies on physical and mental health, neighbourhood cohesion and children’s welfare. This would involve making parks and other green-blue environments safe, welcoming and available to all; and building on improved environmental competencies developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to deepen children’s and young people’s learning about and appreciation of such local places. The pandemic has also revealed how community, migrant-led and faith organisations can provide vital local support during times of crisis. As cities in the UK recover from the pandemic, there is a need to strengthen coordination, communication and consultation between government and on-the-ground organisations; prioritise core funding for translation services and digital training and access; and create structures within and across community and faith groups to support leaders, particularly those working primarily alone. The possibility of radical change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic feels politically remote, but pandemic experiences of dwelling and belonging on the domestic and neighbourhood scales point to some of the ways that we can all strive to live better locally.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge AHRC funding (AH/V013904/1) for ‘Stay Home’: Rethinking the Domestic in the COVID-19 Pandemic, funded as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) rapid response to COVID-19; all of our participants for sharing their experiences of the pandemic; Stay Home Stories community researchers Abigail Agyemang, Yasmin Aktar, Julie Begum, Liza Caruana-Finkel, Filiz Emre, Patrick Graham, Anna Key, Sheekeba Nasimi and Kay Stephens for conducting interviews in London and Liverpool; and editors Frederick Cooper and Des Fitzgerald for their very helpful feedback on this chapter.

Note

1 We use ‘neighbourhood’ to refer to the places local to where people live and with which they identify. This could be a specific physical space or administratively defined place but might also be an ‘imagined’ space; we are interested in people’s pandemic sense of place and its relationship to their ideas of home.

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Knowing COVID- 19

The pandemic and beyond

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