Thanks, all. It's one of my favorites from the wartime photos my dad managed to bring home. The camera angle is somewhat perplexing, somewhat above street level, so I made a Google visit to the area. As best I can tell, he must have shot it from a balcony in the building on Regent St James that houses the N. Peal shop. Also, to my eye, there's a bit of foreshortening in the view, so he may have had a short telephoto lens of some sort to use with the camera, whatever it was.
In a later letter home, sent from Paris in December '45, my dad references pictures of Notre Dame and Montmartre "shot with a French plate camera, on German plates, developed in English developer, and timed with a Swiss stopwatch". Not sure that's the combination he used in the UK; I've been digging through his and other family photos for 10 years now and the Paris photos have never materialized.
