A Belisha beacon blinks outside the library where twenty-seven-year old Tarik Majid crosses on his way to meet his cousin brother Malik. Perhaps the crossing is a tribute to Belisha himself who lived in a street behind the Marriott, one of a maze of lanes built over the ancient priory lands where eminent Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians composed librettos, penned plays, sculpted, painted portraits, danced and wrote poetry. Belisha counted among his neighbours statesmen, sea captains and impresarios. The draper, Dickins who with his partner John Prichard Jones opened a department store on Regent Street. John Spedan Lewis who opened his own on nearby Oxford Street. Samuel Chappell, the music publisher and Charles Douglas Home, editor of The Times. Here was Sarah Garrard, widow of the jeweller, Robert. Here Henry Vesting Jones, Captain of the Naiad which towed the stricken Belleisle back to Gibraltar in the fury of the storm that followed Trafalgar. John Gutzon Mothe Borglum whose dynamite chiselled faces of four presidents from the rock of Mount Rushmore lived on Mortimer Crescent. Orwell was a boy here, H.G. Wells taught in a school on the Crescent and the barrister, Leslie Isaac Hore-Belisha who became Minister of Transport walked these roads. The clown passed them all on his north and southward travels; some he recognised. Once while he rested on his haunches outside the Westminster Bank, Spedan Lewis handed him sixpence, thinking him a vagrant, and he played checkers in the Old Black Lion with Captain Jones who had no teeth and whose hand shook.