Juber Hussain remembers living in Davenant House in the 1990s
Contributed by Survey of London on Nov. 29, 2017
Juber Hussain spent some of his childhood living in Davenant House in the 1990s, he remembers some of his family's daily struggles,
"[In] Davenant House, [Old] Montague Street, there'd be prostitutes sleeping on our door. We would wake up to go to school and we had like this black railing that we had to first open, and you couldn't open it because someone was sleeping there. There got to be a drunkard or a prostitute sleeping there, and it was very awkward. Sometimes, my mum would push the gate so hard to open it while they're still sleeping and then they’d pee and the pee would just trickle, and my mum would [pour] hot water in the mess, and every morning she'd be washing. She hated it.
There was a house above us that was a crack house. Prostitutes, drug, gambling. [They were] Bengali, Asian. And that was number 11. We were No. 1, No. 11 was on the top, and they had the balcony access to the roof and they'd do everything on the roof, and that's our roof, basically. Even with all the complaints, nothing happened."
Juber Hussain was interviewed by Shahed Saleem at the East London Mosque on 01.04.16