The musical émigrés from Nazi-Europe who shaped postwar Britain

Halfway up the stairs to the Royal College of Music’s exhibition Music, Migration & Mobility is a map of NW3, covered in red dots. It’s centred on the Finchley Road north of Swiss Cottage, and every dot (there are nearly 50) represents a business or an institution associated, in the middle years of the last century, with a refugee from the Nazis. Herr Zwillenberg offers upholstery repairs; a grocer stocks sauerkraut ‘and all Continental Delicacies’. There are adverts for fundraising concerts and political lectures; a Blue Danube Club and a Café Vienna. It’s urban Mitteleuropa in miniature, uprooted, transplanted, and clinging together for comfort and mutual support. They called it ‘Finchleystrasse’.

It’s mostly vanished now, though there are still many who remember when South Hampstead was a little Vienna or Berlin; and when the members of the Amadeus Quartet – three Viennese refugees and an Englishman – had their Stammtisch at the Cosmo Restaurant on Northways Parade.