TWO families have trained more than a dozen CCTV cameras on each other’s homes in a row over a 16ft fence festooned with shoes, ribbons and brightly coloured rags.

Gloria Reid, 49, put up the fence at her home in North Weald in response to what she claims was years of harassment from her neighbours.

She moved out of the Weald Bridge Road house after splitting with her husband, moving back into the home in 2002. Relations with the neighbours deteriorated immediately.

Mrs Reid said: “They made it clear from day one that my type wasn’t welcome around here.

“Almost on the day I came back they made holes in the fence and would be spying on me.”

She said she put up the fence a year ago after her neighbours erected an eighth CCTV camera.

“I thought ‘If you want to look at something, look at that’,” she added.

Next door live Clark Pickering, 74, and his wife Mary, 73, who claim that Mrs Reid was the first to install cameras, and have demanded that the district council force Mrs Reid to remove her fence.

Their son Garry, 50, said: “Before all this started, my parents would have her children around, and my dad would pick the daughter up from down the road to save her walking all the way.

“No-one can say ‘this is the reason it all happened’.”

Mrs Pickering said: “Everywhere you go you feel you are being watched.

“We had our house valued at £500,000 a few years ago, you couldn’t give it away now.”

Epping Forest District Council say no planning regulations have been breached, and council leader Leslie Wagland said they had already gone above and beyond their duty in trying to broker a deal between the warring families.

“We’re not here to act as a headmaster’s study,” she added.

“We’re not the people you come to and say ‘I’m more right than they are’.”

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