There is a ladder over the fence at the back of our terrace. It has been there since Tuesday, or possibly since the Tuesday before that. It is aluminium, six rungs, with a smear of mortar near the top that has never quite come off. It belongs to someone. I am not entirely sure who.
This is the thing about a ladder. It is not a gift. It is not a loan in any formal sense. It is a favour that has been left in place, hooked over the fence like a sentence without a full stop, waiting for the rest of the thought. The ladder is the unit of account in a currency that never appears on a receipt.
The Ledger You Cannot See
Every street keeps a ledger. It is not written down. It is not balanced. But it exists, and it is more precise than most people admit. The neighbour who fed the cat. The one who took in the parcel. The one who lent the drill, the stepladder, the jump leads, the folding table for the jubilee party that nobody quite wanted to host. These are transactions. They are just not the kind that get recorded.
The Office for National Statistics has tried to count them. In its social capital framework, one of the headline measures is the proportion of people who borrow things and exchange favours with their neighbours. In 2011/12, that figure stood at 41% across the UK. Two in five adults, in other words, were running a tab with the people next door. The ONS also found that 71% of people felt others in their local area were willing to help their neighbours. That is not a small number. It is a majority of the country describing an economy that does not appear in GDP.
What the figures cannot show is the texture of it. The way a favour is asked for — the half-sentence at the gate, the text that starts with “sorry to bother you” — and the way it is repaid, which is rarely with anything as crude as money. You repay a ladder with a bag of plums from the allotment. You repay a lift to the station with a jar of marmalade. You repay the loan of a drill with the loan of a pressure washer, and so the ledger rolls forward, never settling, never meant to settle.
Who Gives, Who Receives
The ONS data from the first year of the pandemic gives a clearer picture of who is doing the giving. In March 2021, 29.6% of women in the UK reported providing practical help — shopping, cooking, cleaning, childcare, personal needs — to family, friends or neighbours outside their own household, compared with 22.5% of men. That is a gap of more than seven percentage points. The same release found that 36.5% of people aged 50 to 64 were giving practical help, the highest of any age group. And in Great Britain between May and August 2020, 65.8% of people aged 65 to 74 said they had checked on neighbours who might need help at least once in the past seven days, compared with 41.3% of those aged 16 to 24.
These are not moral judgments. They are descriptions of who holds the claims. The people most likely to be giving practical help are often the ones with the least spare time to spend the favours they have accrued. The retired neighbour who checks on you every day is not building a surplus. She is maintaining a position. The young person who has never knocked on a door is not selfish. He is simply not yet in the system.
There is a geography to this too. The ONS found that in 2011 to 2012, people in rural areas were more likely to trust their neighbours than people in urban areas — 78% compared with 61%. Rural areas also scored higher on the belief that people are willing to help. This is not because rural people are morally superior. It is because the ledger is more visible there. In a city, you can go weeks without needing the person next door. In a village, the person next door is the person who takes your delivery, watches your house, and knows your car. The economy of favours is denser where the alternatives are thinner.
The Direction of Travel
The more troubling number is not the pandemic-era rise in borrowing and exchanging favours — the ONS recorded a 3.6 percentage point increase among women in England between 2019-20 and 2020-21, from 34.9% to 38.5%. The more troubling number is the long-term trend. For the UK, data collected in March 2021 showed a fall of 8.0 percentage points since 2014-15 in the percentage of people agreeing that others in their neighbourhood can be trusted, and a fall of 7.2 percentage points in the belief that people in the local area are willing to help their neighbours.
The ONS is careful to note that these comparisons are with 2014-15 and cannot be attributed solely to the pandemic. The drift is longer than that. It is the slow erosion of the assumption that the person next door is an asset rather than a risk. It is the fence getting higher, the gate getting locked, the ladder staying on your own side.
I am not immune to this. I have borrowed things and not returned them promptly. I have seen a neighbour in the street and calculated whether a conversation would cost me more than a nod. The ledger does not balance itself. It requires maintenance, and maintenance requires effort, and effort is the thing we are all shortest of.
The Allotment as Long Ledger
If the ladder is the short-term instrument of this economy, the allotment is the long-term one. A plot is a favour to a future self and to whoever inherits the surplus. The University of Sheffield study of household food-growers found that those who grow their own produced more than half of the vegetables they consumed — 51% — and 20% of their fruit. They ate 6.3 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, 70% higher than the UK national average of 3.7. And they wasted almost nothing: fruit and vegetable waste was 95% lower than the average UK household.
That last figure is the one that stays with me. The study’s authors noted that participants commonly donated unneeded food and preserved or froze excess. The allotment does not just feed the grower. It feeds the network. A glut of courgettes is not a problem to be solved. It is a debt to be paid. You leave them on doorsteps. You take them to the market. You hand them over the fence with the ladder still hooked in place.
But the land base for this is shrinking. Research by the University of Sheffield, analysing maps of major UK cities from the early 1900s to 2016, found that land dedicated to allotment use has declined by 65% from its peak between the 1940s and 1960s. Waiting lists are up 81% on twelve years ago, with around 174,000 people waiting for a plot. The most deprived areas have suffered eight times more allotment closures than wealthy areas. The ledger is being closed in the places that need it most.
Sheffield City Council still publishes a dataset showing the boundaries of its managed allotment sites. It is a map of what remains. It does not show the waiting lists, or the condition of the plots, or the number of people who have given up and bought a raised bed from a garden centre instead. It shows boundaries. That is all.
What the Ladder Costs
The ladder over the fence is not a solution to anything. It is not a policy proposal. It is not a call to action. It is a fact of the street, and it is disappearing, and the disappearance is not dramatic. It is the slow accumulation of small decisions: the decision not to knock, the decision not to ask, the decision to buy your own ladder and keep it in the shed.
I do not know who owns the ladder over our fence. I could find out. I could knock on the door and ask. But there is a kind of contract in not asking. The ladder is there because someone needed it and someone else provided it, and the obligation has not yet been called in. To resolve it would be to end it. To leave it is to keep the ledger open.
So the ladder stays. It will stay until it rusts, or until someone moves, or until the fence is replaced and the ladder is taken down and returned to whoever it belongs to. And when that happens, the street will be slightly tidier and slightly poorer. The economy of favours will have lost another unit of account. The fence will be just a fence.
But for now, the ladder is there. It is a small thing. It is a claim held in common. It is the ordinary machinery of a street that has not yet decided to stop being a street.