When the Streets Fell Silent

Iqbal Hussain is the UK winner of The World of Interiors x Montblanc Writing Competition 2025. Thank you to everyone who entered, and to our collaborative partner Montblanc – whose commitment to enduring craftsmanship helped inspire our theme: ‘One Lasting Thing’

By Iqbal Hussain

8 October 2025

There’s a cobblestone on our mantelpiece – heavy, paperback-sized, gently curved on top. It comes from the year my world unravelled.

When I was ten, our two-up, two-down on Blackburn’s Lower Audley estate was marked for demolition – as was the entire neighbourhood: red-brick terraces built for millworkers, now declared unfit for modern life. The regimented streets, smoking chimneys and wild spaces were to be wiped away. The map was being redrawn.

It started in the summer, with a brown envelope on the doormat: a letter from the council, serving a compulsory purchase order. My parents, unsure of the long words, asked my eldest brother to translate. It took a while for the sombre message to sink in: we had a year to leave.

Autumn heralded change not just with swirling leaves but slowly emptying streets. Neighbours packed their belongings into rattling Bedford vans and exchanged drawn-out goodbyes. I clung to the familiar – playing cricket on cobbled roads, hopscotch on flagstone pavements, hide-and-seek in back alleys. As friends vanished, the games ceased.

The hardest goodbye was to Shaheeda, my best friend next door. She moved to Manchester. We had no car, so it might as well have been Pakistan. Dad rang the council daily, arguing in fractured English and fiery Punjabi. It made no difference to the faceless bureaucrats. We had to go.

By winter, more than half the street had disappeared. Street corners became dumping grounds for belongings unfit for a new home: faded salwaar kameez, broken toys, paperwork and lopsided furniture.

Snow fell. Darkness closed in. Fewer and fewer lights illuminated the street, and when the lampposts blew out, the bulbs weren’t replaced. Houses stood empty, their laughter gone. Doors creaked and banged in the wind. Fires broke out in overgrown gardens, started by who knew whom. The wails of sirens became our evening soundtrack. Men in hi-viz boarded up front doors but left the windows gaping. I stopped playing outside, convinced I saw figures drifting through hollow houses. At night, I jumped at unexplained noises from the abandoned rooms on either side.

In spring, the bulldozers arrived. The neighbourhood began to resemble a war zone. It felt like an invasion to glimpse into rooms that had once been personal and proud, now gutted and exposed. Even Dad, worn down, finally admitted the fight was lost. That summer, he arranged for a van to collect our things. We were among the last to leave. As we closed the door for the final time, without bothering to lock up, I stopped to pick up a cobblestone. How many had walked on it? Skipped across it? Cursed it? Noticed it? The stone remains a prized possession – a tangible memory of what was, and what will never be again. Those brown envelopes exploded like bombs, shattering a community. Streets were ripped up and replaced by a maze of new roads. Relationships built over generations crumbled. The familiar became unknown. It would take years to understand the weight of that loss.

About the author

Iqbal’s first children’s book, The Night I Borrowed Time, is published by Puffin in 2026. Though today he lives happily in London with his partner and dog, When the Streets Fell Silent details his traumatic departure from Blackburn. Evoking a community eroded as feet wear away cobblestone, the piece impressed the judges with its sense of time passing: ‘a year in the life of waiting for the bulldozers’, as Indira puts it. ‘It’s so moving: you really feel the people disappearing.’ Hamish agrees: ‘These little houses were doomed, but each held this incredible story.’

Further reading on The World of Interiors Writing Competition: