DON’T be silly – we’re not shy at all!
That was the message from Portsmouth people who were stunned at research which claimed the city was home to the least outgoing residents in the UK.
It comes after The News reported yesterday on research by The Big Lunch project, which aims to get people socialising with those who live near them. It found that 57 per cent of people in Portsmouth did not know their neighbours.
The main reason given by people who responded to the survey was that people are too shy to knock on the door.
But people in the city didn’t seem to agree Jack Edwards, from Portchester, is a West End actor with a big personality – and he thinks a lot of people are much more like him than they are the shy, retiring type.
Jack, who once went out on the streets with The News during a long wet summer to get people ‘singing in the rain’ said shy was definitely the wrong word to describe Portsmouth people.
But he added that the problem might be that we’re just all too busy to take time to find out more about our neighbours. He said: ‘People in Portsmouth might not know their neighbours. But that’s because we’re a busy city – not a shy one.
‘When our neighbours moved in, we bought them a nice bunch of flowers.
And although we might not have dinner and a glass of wine with them, we can trust that they will keep an eye on our house. We might not know them through and through but that’s not because we were shy. I think that Portsmouth is a city that is busy. People are just caught up in their own things.’
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