Lorenzo Marioni at the New Piccadilly Cafe in Denman Street before its demolition

I’D forgive tourists arriving in central London for thinking it is somehow law to have a maroon Pret A Manger on every street corner.

But it wasn’t always like this. Fifteen years has flown by since the sad closure of that classic cubbyhole in Denman Street – the New Piccadilly Cafe.

Oh boy, how its decor took you on a time-machine loop, making you want to sit in regardless of what you had ordered: comfy booths with lemon yellow formica – the chrome coffee machine always whirring.

And behind the counter was the erstwhile manager Lorenzo Marioni – whose father Pietro had opened it up as a “working men’s cafe” in 1951.

Stroll down that road now and you’ll see the Ham Yard development; nondescript might be a good word for it.

Disappointingly, attempts to get the cafe and its sign listed fell on deaf ears.

But I can close my eyes and see Lorenzo still there.

“I want it to go with me,” he told me when it was finally announced that the cafe must close to make way for the bulldozers.

“I couldn’t have someone else in here with the same furniture. Now they are going to knock everything down at least I can say I stayed until the end.”

His cafe was no stranger to famous faces. Diana Dors was among its fans.

But while it became a refuge for Soho’s great schemers and one or two society figures too, Lorenzo hated the idea that a cup of coffee was becoming as expensive as a lunch itself, baulking at the idea of companies meeting the high rents by selling lattes at nearly £5.

“I will go off into the sunset and not look back,” he said at its closure.

But we do, fondly.