The clown looks across to the west side of the street to a small tree that stands outside the fashion store and the butcher’s next to it. Bedecked with flowers and handwritten tributes; a shrine to a young woman gunned down a millennium after he too was left for dead. Hoodlums whose need for revenge outmatched their aim; the bullets of their Mach 10s meant for the South Kilburn Mandem who loitered on the corner, but flying wide of the mark and taking an innocent to her tomb. Partly obscured by the grief tree, seventy-eight-year-old Dennis Prosser walks out of the butcher’s with a slight limp carrying two chops in a blue and white striped plastic bag, one for him and the other for Imani, the wife for whom he provides but with whom he doesn’t live. Imani yet to tell her family that she has married a British man. A Christian. Prosser’s wife sending his money to her sister in Jordan every month, “for medicine.” Prosser toiling at the Tesco Metro near the Old Bell and yet to tell his wife that he’s had to take out a loan to cover the payments. Still, they’ll have Easter Day together which is something; Prosser who might have retired ten years ago had he not sat next to Imani at a residents’ association meeting, who still works because he has to, because his wife’s sister is sick.

The Jew, Heilemann set up his stall in Chelsea in 1845, before changing his name to Hillman to fare better with the pig-loving British; moving his cleavers, hooks and blocks to the High Road almost a century ago. There had been a butcher here before him, two in fact, and before these a photographic studio presided over by the son of John Jabez Edwin Mayall, the man who sat the grimacing racist, Marx on a wooden armchair in his studio, the revolutionary’s hand inside his jacket as if reaching for his manifesto, though more likely his cigars, capturing him for eternity. Gold art deco lettering on polished blue bears the name of Hillman’s store, a throwback to when the shop next door was a wine merchant, an agency upstairs provided domestic servants to Kilburn’s mansion dwellers, and gas lamps stood on an island in the middle of the wide, unpaved road. Only the undertaker, Crook and the four taverns have been here this long. Ale, meat and death the only survivors in a city that eats its own children.