Last year the country was full of them. Streets closed and lined with tables piled high with cakes and sandwiches getting soggier and soggier in the torrential rain that marked the Queen's diamond jubilee.
Yet despite the rain, everyone who went to a street party will tell you that it was the best day of the year.
One of my friend's at work told me that when they had their street party, one of their oldest residents came. He spent most of his days by himself and didn't really know anyone in their close. But he motored around the party on his mobility scooter, balancing a beer on the handlebars. And at the end of the evening, he wheeled his way home grinning, telling his newly familiar neighbours it had been the best day of his life.
He died a week later, not lonely and forgotten but part of a community.
I'm not sure why it is that, as a nation, we seem to spend very little time getting to know our neighbours
Perhaps it's because of the weather.
When it's cold and wet, it's easier to stay inside huddled around the television than to brave the elements and pop next door.
Perhaps it's because none of us stay in one place anymore.
In the past, generations of families would live on the same street, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all living next door to each other with the grand children and great-grandchildren constantly drifting through the always open doors. Your street and local community were based around your family.
Perhaps it's because we are all so busy balancing work and family, living such hectic lives that there is not enough time and it is just too tiring to make the effort.
Perhaps it's because computer games and on-demand television can keep children entertained for hour upon hour, without needing to find peers on their street to play with.
Making time to meet neighbours who you know nothing about, who might come from a different country, a different culture, a different generation, is not easy.
But it's definitely worth the effort.
And street parties make it much easier because, you suddenly have something in common: a shared memory.
And shared memories are often the place where friendship begins.
Like many other roads, we had a street party last year, full of Union Jacks and snail races and drunken half-renditions of God Save the Queen. It was only a few hours, but in that afternoon we stopped being just a street and became a community.
Our road is not a long road. It has about a hundred houses. We have lived here for most of the past 13 years and yet, last year, I met people I didn't recognise.
This year we knew almost everyone.
The Diamond Jubilee was a good excuse to close the road and dance on the street.
This year we didn't have an excuse or a reason. When people asked why we were having another street party, the only thing we could think to say was: "Why not?"
And that seemed to be reason enough for everyone.
So on last week's sunny, blue-skied May Day Bank Holiday, we put up official "Road Closed," signs, emptied the street of cars ( the hardest part, but in the end there was only one left ) set up covered tables down the middle of the road, put an urn in the front garden, a cool box full of beer on the pavement, speakers in our neighbour's garden .....and waited.
And gradually the tables filled with delicious food.
And the road filled with people. Old....
and young....
and teenagers ...
and everybody in-between.
And instead of cars accelerating up the road, all you could hear was music and chatter and laughter. The kids - big and little -covered the street with chalked pictures, glue and play dough. And while the" street seniors," helped us judge our newly traditional May Day hat competition, teenagers lounged on chairs and secretly sipped Pimms, while people from opposite ends of the street met and smiled and became friends.
And when, at 8 pm we had to take away the " Road Closed," signs, no one wanted the party to end. So we moved it onto the pavement.
And children didn't go to bed and neighbours didn't stop talking and cars driving up the road again, didn't stop us feeling that old and young and in-between, we were all part of this place. And small as our road is, we all belonged to it.
And that sense of belonging leaves you feeling warm inside, long after the sun has gone down.
It's a simple thing, a street party.
But it made me wonder.
Wonder what would happen if we all spent more time getting to know each other.
Wonder what would happen if we all felt part of a community, even a community as small as a street.
Wonder what would happen if, instead of building walls between ourselves and our neighbours,we built bridges.
We live such scattered, isolated, separate lives that it is easy to forget how important it is to sit and talk and laugh. And maybe even dance.....
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