Outside 19 Conduit Street on the edge of Mayfair in London, the brass plate still gleams. Sofia House, as it is named, is the home of Balkan Holidays Ltd.
This is the last surviving remnant of the capital’s “Iron Curtain Row”. Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the communist dominoes began to tumble, the north side of Conduit Street was punctuated by outposts of eastern European tourist enterprises.
