On a cold, windy night, I am leaving Soho. Outside, I pause to check my messages (as tourist guides should always do), and that is when it happens. For an instant, I feel a shove, sharp enough to make me step back...but when I turn, there is no one there. Except him. He is already halfway down Great Pulteney Street, slipping into a wrought iron doorway I swear was not open a moment ago.

The indelible mark left by the Huguenot community and their development of the silk weaving industry is the stuff of legend. Their skills and entrepreneurial drive led them to settle across the south of England and in America. In the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the small trickle arriving in Britain turned into a steady flow and, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Huguenots made up five per cent of London’s population. Some of these refugee families headed to a small village, now a suburb of South London called Wandsworth.