“People come with a certain budget and we have to work on very little margin. They wear a dress once for a few hours and then they don’t want to wear it again,” says Suvel Ahmed, the owner of Alia Couture and several other shops on the strip, who sells prom dresses at prices ranging from £100 to more than £600.

Bargain prices could be part of the reason the road flies under most shoppers’ fashion radar, according to Vickie Christensen, the chair of the Fonthill Road traders’ association. “It is the best-kept secret in the fashion world. You can buy a blingy dress for £100. When someone else has spent a fortune on the same kind of thing you are not going to tell anyone. Women don’t.”

The shops are run by entrepreneurs with roots in a plethora of countries, from Cyprus and Turkey to Africa and south Asia.

Shoppers come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Those from cultures where importance is placed on glamorous, dressy weddings, smart church outfits or modest garments that cover limbs and cleavages are particularly drawn to the street. The tailoring skills to cater for those needs are still present here.

People with backgrounds in the Caribbean, Africa and Cyprus or Turkey have long been shoppers alongside those of white British heritage, the Irish Traveller, Middle Eastern and south Asian communities. There are also more recent diaspora, including Afghans, Uzbeks and Latin Americans, scanning the rails.

“It is a microcosm of London. We have every nationality under the sun and it works,” Christensen says. “You get grandmothers and younger ones for prom dresses. You tend to find the whole family comes back to where they have been before.”

Once close to a slum – with local boy photographer Don McCullin describing the area as “a battlefield” when he grew up on Fonthill Road in the 1940s and 50s – it has been part of the fashion industry since the 1960s.

The street was home to shops and light industry from its first development in the 1880s, when one local writer described the preponderance of fried-fish shops.

Its links to fashion emerged when entrepreneurs fleeing Cyprus in the 1960s and 1970s bought property for wholesale outlets and factories. By its heyday in the 1980s Fonthill Road was packed with small manufacturers as well as wholesalers catering to retailers large and small, prompting complaints about double parking and burger vans.

Until the late 1990s, Fonthill would be besieged by shoppers on a Saturday morning when the dozens of small wholesale outlets flung open their doors to the public, who could pick up latest fashions at low prices.

“It was really busy. We used to have five people working on a Saturday,” says Paschalis, whose father had a shop on the street from 1985, under a clothing factory where more than a dozen people worked.

“When it switched from wholesale to predominantly retail that’s when business trailed off.”