The historic Cotswold village of Broadway is much admired for its tranquillity and beauty, but behind the picturesque façade lurks a bitter dispute between neighbours living in the same street. Cafe owner Robert Brown took advantage of his long-standing friendship with the McSweeneys and the Maymons to get them to invest in a business proposition to expand his catering empire. Such was their trust that they lent him £120,000 between them, each family unaware that they were not the sole investor. When the business began to fail, they discovered Brown's duplicity and that the chances of getting any money back were remote.
The De Roper family thought that they had found their dream home when they moved into a house in Yeovil, Somerset. That dream was rudely shattered by their larger-than-life neighbour Peter Stoodley and his 120 noisy chickens and cockerels running riot in his small backyard. As well as the chickens, there were rats feasting on the rotting eggs and carcases of dead chickens scattered around the yard. The family spent the next two years battling to persuade the authorities to give Mr Stoodley an ASBO banning him from keeping animals.
Barry and Phyllis Roddis were enjoying an idyllic retirement in their quiet Barnsley neighbourhood until new neighbour Barrie Barker moved in next door and started scrapping cars in his driveway. When Mr Roddis led a neighbourhood appeal to stop the noise, he became the target of Mr Barker's anger. A nine-year campaign of intimidation, verbal and physical abuse followed, which had a devastating effect on the pensioners' lives and finally resulted in a prison sentence for Mr Barker. When Maurice Forsyth-Grant's family fell on hard times, they were forced to vacate and finally sell their ancestral home, Ecclesgreig Castle in Scotland.
The peace of rural Somerset is shattered when animal-loving Meg Sunningdale moves to the small village of Withycombe. Meg fiercely protects all creatures great and small, a view at odds with some of the locals, especially when she takes to feeding the local badgers. Matters come to a head when she erects posters naming and shaming one of the villagers for taking part in a government backed cull to prevent tuberculosis spreading in cattle, resulting in him and his family being driven out by an animal rights backlash. Though Meg receives a police caution, the trouble does not end there. Animal Rights activists start turning up in droves – leaving the village under siege and Meg's relations with her neighbours beyond repair. In Woodford Green, friendships are thrown out of the window when Tariq Ahmed's plans to extend his three-bedroom end-of-terrace house into a five bedroom mansion lead to untold misery for his neighbours Helen Coughlan and Tony and Veronica Martin.