By Martha Buckley BBC News

Crack addicts did not make good neighbours

One homeowner recalls her experience of living near a crack den.

My boyfriend and I bought our first home, a one-bedroom basement flat just off Brighton seafront, in August 2000.

Like most first-time buyers, we worried about how to afford the mortgage and fix the damp problems but we were excited about our new home.

What never crossed our minds was that within six months we would find ourselves living underneath one of the south coast's most notorious drug dens.

Things started going wrong when both sets of upstairs neighbours moved out, to be replaced by a scruffy-looking bunch, who we assumed were new tenants.

They made a lot more noise than our previous neighbours and there seemed to be comings and goings at all times of day and night.

Then, one November weekend, we came home to find police vans outside and a kerfuffle going on in our front garden, which was strewn with broken glass and bits of window frame.

It should have been lovely living by the sea

The police said the place was being used as a crack house, with 25 people squatting in the two-bedroom top-floor flat and more in the middle flat.

Someone had jumped through the first floor window during a row with a dealer.

Officers promised to keep it under observation and gave us a contact number. Then they left and we saw no more of them until the following summer.

In the next few months things got worse. There were often people hanging around the building, some of them intimidating, others pitiful drug-wasted wraiths.

Dealers' cars would wait around the corner and pimps would loiter on the front step, shouting for the prostitutes operating from the building to hurry up.

No-one bothered fixing the window broken back in November.

People started knocking on our door, assuming we too were squatting and asking to come in.

On Christmas Day, my boyfriend was woken by water pouring through our bedroom ceiling from a burst pipe or overflowed bath upstairs.

Inside the floors were littered with used needles and excrement If... drugs were legal

Later, while out at Christmas lunch with his mother, a brick was thrown through our front window.

We were not the only ones suffering. Other neighbours had to put up with noise, intimidation and verbal abuse.

Most people in our terraced row experienced attempted break-ins. A neighbour told me one elderly lady woke to find a drug-addict burglar in her bedroom. She died soon afterwards.

None of us could sell our flats under the circumstances so we were all stuck.

We had put all we had into the flat. I started lying awake at night worrying about how we would ever extricate ourselves.

The stress was getting to all of us, particularly my boyfriend, who veered between wanting to hand our keys back to the bank and walk away, and hiring heavies to throw our unwanted neighbours out.

I started lying awake at night worrying about how we would ever extricate ourselves

I had to plead with him to be patient and give the police just a little longer to sort it out.

Finally, they raided the building and thankfully it was a success.

They found thousands of pounds-worth of drugs, weapons, hundreds of emptied wallets from robberies and stolen passports. They made several arrests.

They also found a 12-foot python, apparently kept as a guard-snake.

It was an immense relief to have the squatters gone but the building was left more or less derelict.

During the raid, the dealers tried to escape by smashing a hole in the roof, which was left uncovered with the rain coming in for a year.

The front windows were boarded up but through the back windows we could see mould and plants growing up the walls.

Inside, the floors were littered with needles and excrement.

It stayed that way until 18 months ago when it was sold to a new freeholder who began repairs. New tenants moved in and life returned to normal.

But as one crack house closes, another one seems to spring up in another part of town, leaving others to endure the same problems we had.