STRANGE to think that on Dean Street, up and alongside this Soho basement, Karl Marx walked to the reading room of the British Museum early every morning, contemplating Das Kapital. Shelley lived around the corner and just through St Anne’s Court almost opposite, William Blake was born and lived his early years.

And along the parallel road, Frith Street, there is Ronnie Scott’s, where in the 1960s the greatest US jazz musicians had opened up London with their sounds.

Now I find myself listening to the clarinet and alto saxophone of 82-year-old Sammy Rimington, who I first heard 64 years ago in the side hall of the Elm Park Hotel, eastwards on the District Line, when he was an 18-year-old debutant in Ken Colyer’s New Orleans Band, as I worked taking coats in the cloakroom of my local St Louis Jazz Club.