Take with me, gentle researcher, a short walk down one of the few streets in London that is as it should be. A street that contains shops that are shops, with owners, not branches of chains with managers¹. Trapped by the anonymous race-track that is Baker Street, and the angry snarl of the pent-up traffic of Marylebone Road, is the little oasis of civilisation that is Chiltern Street.

Leaving the Chiltern Street entrance of Baker Street Tube station² the street looks a little forbidding, with high mansion (apartment) blocks on each side. Look up, my friend, look up. On the top of the gables of the blocks of flats are grinning Gargoyles, every one different. Otherwise, in this first section, march on swiftly southwards, merely glimpsing, on your left, the strange Celtic spellings that announce a Welsh chapel, to the first junction, with Paddington Street. A glance each way will reveal an organic butchers, a traditional greengrocer and a small organic supermarket³

As you cross Paddington Street, there is a tall office block of no particular note. A little diversion to the front doors will enable you, courtesy of a movement detector, to slide the very doors that Gwyneth Paltrow slid⁴. Mortified by the frozen stare of the doorman, you should, starstruck reader, quickly regain your composure, return to Chiltern Street, and cross over the road.

In the two or three minutes it takes to walk this next section you will pass, in short order:

• A Cafe
• A Travel agent for backpackers
• An Office machine shop where they repair typewriters⁵
• A new bed shop
• A 'proper' ironmongers, with bits and pieces hanging everywhere, and hardly room to stand
• An art gallery (Posh name for a picture shop)
• A Hairdressers
• An Estate Agent
• An Indian Restaurant

and then, as you reach the corner of Dorset Street

• A Flute shop

Crossing Dorset Street brings you to the main section of the street, with shops on both sides. This is where you need to be if you have strange feet, if you are going to Ascot⁶ (and are female), if you are about to wed in traditional style (and are female), or if you are a woodwind musician. For here you will find, below the redbrick mansion blocks:

• A woodwind instrument shop (Clarinets, saxophones (woodwind?) Oboes etc)
• A very posh hat shop
• Four bridal dress shops
• A mens formal wear shop (for the groom presumably)
• A Cobbler, that makes and maintains hand made shoes
• Two shoe shops of a specialist nature
• Two Gentleman's Outfitters
• A dental workshop
• A Brassmongers (or whatever a chap is who sells only brass) who delights in railling against his Landlord with hand written signs in the window
• A Spa (whatever that may be)
• A Recorder shop
• A Leather clothes shop (No, not those leather clothes!)
• A shop for tall ladies (They don't sell tall ladies, they sell clothes for tall ladies)
• A Barber (Unfortunately without poles)
• Two hairdressers
• A Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture 'clinic'
• A marble statuary shop
• An antique furniture shop
• Two ladies fashion shops of the type that were once called 'boutiques'
• A floaty dress shop with two branches in the street (It is the dresses that float, not the shops)
• Two couturiers
• Three sandwich shops (But NO, repeat NO, coffee shops, not a Starbuck, Costa or Aroma in sight, nary a Coffee Republic, a Cafe Nero or even a Pret a Manger (yet!))
• A newsagent
• A pub

Finally, as you reach Blandford Street, and the end of our meander, there is a fine Edwardian Fire Station. This is under continual threat of closure, and the Fire Engines seem to take a stroppy pleasure in emphasising their indispensible presence by wailing their sirens as loudly as possible on each urgent exit.

So there you have it, a sliver of City life as it should be, a little uplift to your soul, a home for tradesmen and shopkeepers in the heart of the West End. Not quaint, not exclusive, not prettified, not self-conscious, not 'marketed', just plain and right.