On the west side of the great road, stuck between a carpet seller and a fashion boutique, close to where John Gregg slots coins into a payphone beneath a silver maple, a WHSmith stationer’s. Not so much as a way marker to remember the man who lived in a grand townhouse just a few hundred yards away. A plaque adorns the façade of 12, Hyde Park Street where Smith passed his formative years, but this shabby outlet is his true memorial. Empires fall, nations crumble but it must have been decreed that there will always be a WHSmith at 113 Kilburn High Road. The clown never spoke to Smith but passed him on the road; an elderly gentleman in a bowler hat waiting patiently as children patted his Jack Russell, Scottie; the broadsheets, penny dreadfuls and yellow shilling novels which flew from station newsstands across the country adding a hundred pounds to his coffers every minute.