A ‘nightmare neighbour’ has been sent to prison after she repeatedly played the Ed Sheeran song ‘Shape of You’ at loud volume until late at night.

Sonia Bryce played the song as part of a campaign of noise disturbance against her next door neighbours, a court has heard.

Bryce – a social housing tenant in Walsall – subjected Clare Tidmarsh and her family to ‘continuous playing of loud music, shouting, loud talking and swearing’, a court heard.

The noise got so bad that Mrs Tidmarsh, a childminder who owns her semi-detached home, was forced to put it on the rental market in order to escape.

Details of the dispute emerged after Bryce’s landlord, the Walsall Housing Group, took the mother of three to court to try to enforce the peace.

From early 2016, Bryce caused ‘a wholly unacceptable level of disturbance through loud noise involving music, shouting, swearing and banging, time and time again’, Walsall County Court heard.

The housing association successfully obtained a legal injunction – backed by a power of arrest for breach – banning Bryce from causing any further noise nuisance.

But by November last year Bryce had breached the injunction no fewer than ten times, as result of which she was sentenced to spend six weeks in prison over Christmas.

The disturbances restarted almost as soon as Bryce was released, Walsall court heard.

From February this year, Clare Tidmarsh, who has five children aged between 14 and three, had been ‘subjected to continuous noise nuisance by the behaviour of Miss Bryce, her family and a continuous stream of visitors’, Judge Philip Gregory ruled earlier this month.

Among the disturbances was an occasion when Bryce allowed the same Ed Sheeran song to be played ‘over and over again’ from 9pm, Judge Gregory said.

Bryce, who represented herself in court, denied the allegation, explaining that she ‘doesn’t even like Ed Sheeran’. Judge Gregory rejected the denial.

On another occasion, Bryce was found to have allowed loud music to be played at her home for ‘hours and hours, until 4.53 in the morning’.

She also allowed so much cannabis to be smoked in the home, that it caused a ‘nuisance through smell’ to the Tidmarshes next door.

Speaking in her own defence, Bryce claimed that some of the late night noise occurred when she allowed her five year old child to watch television until 11.30pm – something the judge described as ‘remarkably irresponsible.’

Sentencing Bryce to eight weeks in prison, Judge Philip Gregory said “You have displayed nothing but violent animosity towards your neighbour.

“I am quite convinced that you do not care tuppence about the effect that your behaviour has upon perfectly decent and respectable people next door.”

“Everyone is entitled to live in a degree of peace and quiet with the usual give and take of society,”, the judge went on, “but you do not behave like a civilised person and you have got to learn that you will.”

 

Source: The Mirror, to read the article click here.