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"The noise was so loud I thought he had an angle grinder up there," Doris Fox, 68, told Thanet Magistrates’ Court, Kent, in a recent case. In the dock stood Giran Jobe, 36, and 15 stone.

Although grunting is not a specific offence under English law, Mr Jobe’s regular grunts had become unbearable to neighbours – that and the noise emitted when his bodybuilder power weights came crashing down on the carpet of his top-floor flat in Margate.

The carpenter was unusually keen on exercising with weights and his regular two-hour sessions at night could register noise as high as 100 decibels (the level of noise at a platform of an Underground station when a train arrives).

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After an initial complaint from neighbours to the local authority, Mr Jobe was issued with a noise abatement order. But soon after that new complaints were filed at Thanet Council so investigators were sent to the downstairs homes to install recorders to monitor Mr Jobe's decibel levels.

During the next six months families living below Mr Jobe recorded 47 breaches of the noise abatement order. The offending sounds were cited as “grunting” and “noise from the weights hitting the floor”. Mr Jobe was fined £70. He has pledged to focus on push-ups.

Other proceedings about more usual noise have not been successful. In a civil action in 1999, the House of Lords decided that the ordinary use of residential premises was not itself capable of being a nuisance, and that local authority landlords (Southwark and Camden Councils) had not breached their covenants to tenants for what is quaintly known in law as “quiet enjoyment” of the leased properties.

One of the tenants in the un-soundproofed blocks had testified that she could hear “all the private and most intimate moments” of her neighbours' lives. This included “what TV station they are viewing, when they go to the toilet, when they make love”. The court said that these things should have been contemplated by the tenants when they moved into the flats. Another tenant testified that she could hear “singing, arguments, the television, snoring, coughing, bringing up of phlegm, sneezing, bedsprings, footfalls and creaking floorboards, the pull-cord light switch in the bathroom, taps running in the bathroom and kitchen, the toilet being used . . . the vacuum cleaner and . . . music played on the stereo”. A legally endorsed soundtrack of domestic Britain.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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