I'm not entirely sure, I must admit, what dear old Boris Johnson means when he worries that Londoners live like Hobbits. I confess that I've never been able to get to grips with Tolkien's masterpiece, so the precise living arrangements of Hobbits are a tad mysterious to me. Yet I suspect some confusion in the Johnson cranium: I sense that “living like Hobbits” means that we're all cramped and huddled together, our spirits burdened by the absence of cat-swinging room.

But then I think, hang on, don't Hobbits live in the bucolic Shire? Never mind. I think Boris means that Londoners' houses are too small, and we all suffer because of it. I beg to differ. I grew up in a two-bedroomed apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City, an apartment on the 25th floor of a 30-storey building.

These days the West 60s is considered a toney address; take my word for it, four decades ago it was not. (Remember Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment? Lemmon's dismal pad was on the Upper West Side.) When I moved to England, people would ask me, rhetorically, whether I was relieved to have left behind the soulless existence of the tower block-dweller for the happy life only available to those fortunate enough to live in proper houses. I got the sense that a home was not a home unless it had a shed. But - soulless existence? It depends what you mean.

I never thought that individuals owned washing machines until I moved to England. In many New York buildings there isn't room in every apartment for a machine - but there's space in the basement, where there are ranks of them. What does this mean? Why, that you meet your neighbours, chatting to them as you fold the laundry.

Also: mail is not delivered to your apartment, it is delivered to the mailroom, where there are further opportunities for shooting the breeze. Every floor of the building offers an even cosier option for getting to know your fellow human beings: babysitting for them, feeding their cats, offering to do a spot of shopping if someone's ill or elderly.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that this kind of thing never happens in London. But when my father died last year and I spent nearly six weeks at home with my mother, in the apartment where I grew up, I was overwhelmed by the kindness, the humanity, the neighbourliness of our neighbours. I still am, every time I go back.

Overcrowding is a problem in cities, one that the leaders of those cities must address. But those leaders shouldn't assume that there's anything wrong with living in close proximity to other people. We're humans, after all - not Hobbits.

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