The locations on the standard British version of the board game Monopoly are set in London and were selected in 1935 by Victor Watson, managing director of John Waddington Limited. Our next throw will give us the chance of landing on what serious Monopoly players believe to be among the most lucrative slots on the board – the orange run of Bow Street, Marlborough Street and Vine Street. Instead, a 10 takes us to the Strand, and another two gives us a walk east as it transforms into Fleet Street.

Its success was so noticeable, in fact, that word reached Parker Brothers, who invited Darrow to sell the rights to the game to them for full publication.The newspapers are long gone, of course, all scattered to Canary Wharf and King's Cross and Victoria, but if Fleet Street is no longer the Street of Ink, it remains the Street of Drink, with Ye Olde Cock Tavern and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese battling it out for the title of Ye Oldest pub on the strip. That first edition used the New Jersey resort of Atlantic City to supply its street names, as the US edition still does, but the game crossed the oceans almost immediately.

As a Londoner, it’s perfectly logical that Park Lane and Mayfair are expensive areas while Whitechapel is relatively cheap. Among its players there was Scott Nearing, a radical economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who used it as a teaching tool.

Watson became interested in the board game after his son Norman had tried the Parker Brothers original US version and recommended the company produce a board for the domestic market. And this year a documentary about the game, Under the Boardwalk, won the audience award for best documentary at the Anaheim film festival.