Carnaby Street was a back lane until a fire moved John Stephen onto it. A Glaswegian who came down to London in 1952, he opened a shop on Beak Street in 1956, lost it to fire the year after and took a lease at number 5. By 1967 he had fifteen shops on the one street and the papers were calling him the King of Carnaby Street.

Flock is the oldest trick in wallpaper. Powdered wool, swept up as waste from the cloth trade and glued onto a printed pattern so paper could pass for cut velvet at a fraction of the price. Pompadour hung English flock at Versailles and Pugin ran it through the Palace of Westminster, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was finished, written off as dusty and dark. Sixty years later it came back on a street full of twenty year olds, printed with sunglasses and daisies and a spiral going down a drain.

This came back to Australia with a collector who was there.