He also regrets the passing of the ‘carriage trade’ from the big houses in Caversham Road and Bartholomew Villas, and feels sad – and he is not the only one – that Kentish Town High Street, once a place of private businesses held on modest rents, has now been battered and despoiled by alien commercial pressures: “In the old days, we all knew each other. Kentish Town was a lovely place then, it really was. There was more violence in parts of course – you used to see some dreadful things, fights outside the pubs and so on. But there was Mr Dunn, the owner of the hatters next door to us; he used to come and visit my father smoking a big cigar, and when he died he left it in his Will that Dunns was to go on doing as much business as possible with us – of course that’s all been forgotten now. And there was Mr Rex of Salter Rex with a spade beard and a top-hat like Churchill’s – they had a beautiful office down the road, all mahogany, and when he came in all the clerks used to get up and say together ‘good morning Mr Rex’. And then there was Mr Head, the shopwalker at Daniels, the big stores; he was always very smart in a frock coat, everyone knew Mr Head. All gone now, all those people. Just gone, and nothing left of them.”

In the 1920s the nextdoor shop was owned by a greengrocer (Walter Ansell) who did a little horse-dealing on the side, keeping the horses behind the shop on some waste land backing onto the Midland Railway. He apparently looked as rural as he sounds, being given to old-fashioned farmer’s corduroy trousers with wads of cash kept inside the front flap. One day he was standing before his shop in this guise looking pleased with himself, and told Mr Hamilton senior that he’d just bought the freehold of the place for cash’. He suggested that Hamiltons tried to do the same and they took his advice and did – which is how, today, Mr Hamilton junior comes to be his own master, still running his admirable low-turnover business in an era when such useful shops are more and more being squeezed out by huge rent increases only payable by large companies or by the proprietors of luxury high-turnover businesses such as restaurants and clothes shops.

But even he will not remain forever: “I’m getting on, I suppose I’ll have to be thinking about retiring soon and letting the business go. My wife and I do discuss it, but the thing is, I’m too used to work and I’m too much of a one for having things the way I’m used to them. I don’t know what I’d do, with nothing to do all day. The shop’s been my life, really. I’ve never had the time to develop any hobbies. It was all so different, long ago – I really can’t convey it.”