Our next-door neighbour has a very large house and some 7 acres of
derelict orchard behind it, some of it extending behind our house and
garden. He also runs most of his heating on a wood-fired boiler. In the
past he had his wood store and saw bench halfway down the orchard, but
in the last fortnight he has built a very large woodshed out of derelict
asbestos sheeting right at the bottom of our garden, in full view of our
house (though not his). In the course of building it, he has hacked
(his) laurel hedge between us more or less to the ground and replaced it
with a few tiny saplings. We are becoming reconciled to the thought that
we might have to put up a fence to hide some of the eyesore (it's about
10-12 feet tall), at least from the ground floor....

But the second problem is, he has, in the past, spent a lot of his time
cutting logs on his bench saw, and it used to be bad enough from halfway
through the orchard. Now the woodshed is the obvious place to do it. But
we work from home, and our windows face the back....

We are on friendly terms, and I did ask about the sawing, but I didn't
get an answer and he went ahead with it anyway.

I don't suppose there is much we can do: his land is classified as
agricultural land, so sawing wood is part of the brief, and in any case
we would not like to fall out with them - but short of planting a
forest instead of our garden, is there anything we can do to hide the
eyesore and minimise the noise?

--
Klara, Gatwick basin