Joining the British runner at the exclusive event were some of the men who had followed him as the world record holder for the mile.

They included John Landy, the Australian who broke Sir Roger’s world record just 46 days after he set it.

Alongside him were New Zealand’s Peter Snell, Tanzania’s Filbert Bayi, Britain’s Sebastian Coe and Steve Cram, the United States’ Jim Ryun and Algeria’s Noureddine Morceli, the current world record holder at the time.

Also on hand were New Zealand’s John Walker, France’s Michel Jazy and Britain’s Derek Ibbotson.

I have been incredibly lucky enough to have met all 14 world record holders for the mile, including Sir Roger, since he ran 3min 59.4sec at Iffley Road in Oxford on May 6 in 1954.

They all agree on one thing: that having at one point having run a mile faster than anyone else before them, bestowed a special status. 

"If it had been any other event, I don't think I'd be remembered now," Ibbotson, who ran 3:57.2 in 1957, told me that special night of celebration in London.

“I'd be lost.”

Landy, who broke Sir Roger’s record but lost to him shortly afterwards in the “Miracle Mile” at the 1954 British Empire Games in Vancouver, credits it for putting him on the path which saw him become the Governor of Victoria and the best-selling author of two natural history books.

"I was a loner, a shy young man,” he said. "It opened me up to live a life I never thought I'd live."

Cram won the 1500 metres at the first World Athletics Championships at Helsinki in 1983 and a silver medal, behind Coe, at the following year’s Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

But they are a mere footnote to what he achieved over a distance that has never appeared on the Olympic programme and takes place over a unit of measurement most of the world does not even use.

"It becomes luggage permanently attached to your name," Cram said. “It matters not what else you do. You'll be introduced everywhere as world record holder in the mile."

That night in London, like almost everyone else fortunate enough to be present, I scurried from table to table to get my programme signed by as many of the world record holders as I could (now, of course, it would be having a selfie taken with them but this was in the days before smartphones).

I thought of that special evening this week when I read an article in Canadian Running, which asked the question, "Should sub-four be no more?"

It had been prompted by events last weekend at an event staged at Boston University where 52 runners on one day had broken the four-minute mile. It took to 115 the total number of athletes already this year to have broken a barrier that was "once thought impossible if not fatal". 

As recently as 2005, Forbes magazine named Sir Roger’s historic sub-four clocking the "Greatest Athletic Achievement of the past 150 years".

Advancement in shoe technology and the responsiveness of athletics tracks, the facility at Boston University likes to call itself "the fastest track in the world", has helped make something once thought impossible now positively mundane. 

When Sir Roger achieved his historic performance, it was less than a year after Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. By the end of last month, a total of 6,338 different people had reached the top of the earth's highest mountain. It may no longer be headline news when someone reaches the top, but it is still an incredible achievement beyond the imagination of only a very few. 

It is the same with the mile. 

Earlier this month, Track and Field News, the self-proclaimed "bible of the sport since 1948" which has kept a record of every sub-four mile achieved by an American since Sir Roger’s performance in 1954, announced it would no longer update its chronological list of runners who break the barrier.

Track & Field News released a statement: "The advent of super-shoes has bombarded the 4:00 barrier into something no longer relevant for tracking, although many new members would have made it even without high-tech footwear."

(It is worth noting, however, that even with all these technological advances, the current world record of the mile of 3:43.13 has stood to Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj since 1999 and that a woman still has to break four-minutes with the best performance so far of 4:12.33 achieved by The Netherlands' Sifan Hassan four years ago).  

Condemnation of Track and Field News’ announcement was swift in the court of social media. Austin Miller, fresh from recording his first sub-four mile two weeks earlier, was dismissive of Track and Field News’ claim that it was all down to the footwear. "Lol, all these old track nerds love to blame the shoes," he wrote on Twitter.

Track and Field News took the feedback on board. "The readers have spoken!" they said in a new statement. "After a brief period where we had announced we were terminating updating of this feature we soon realised we had misread the audience.. You think it’s relevant, so we’ll continue to list them for you."

It demonstrated that the mile - 1,609m or 5,280 feet - still has an enduring appeal that perhaps only the marathon can match.

Walk into any bar in Britain or the United States and tell them that you have finished a marathon and people will be impressed, whether you took six hours or two hours. But tell them that you have broken four minutes for a mile and you will be treated like some sort of athletics god, with someone inevitably saying, "I couldn't drive a mile in four minutes".

The mile is the only non-metric track event that World Athletics still officially recognises as a record distance, which you would expect from an organisation whose President is one of the greatest milers of all-time.

"In short, no running distance, or field event for that matter, has the history, the appeal, the magic of the Mile," Bring Back the Mile, a US-based organisation devoted to maintaining the mile and its importance, writes.

"No other event has produced an equivalent of the recognised, coveted and still strongly resonating sub-four minute Mile standard in the sport, in the media and in the public’s mind. Put simply, the Mile still matters."

Searching through my old notes from that historic dinner nearly 30 years ago, I stumbled across something that Coe, who broke the world record for the mile three times during his glorious career, had told me that night.

"The bond among us is that which Lady Macbeth describes as a sickness: ambition, the pursuit of excellence," he said. "But you had this feeling that these were men very much at peace with themselves. That each of us realised that what we had done was neither greater nor lesser than what had come before, or after, us, that we were all part of a human progression."

Clocking a sub-four minute mile may no longer be the preserve of athletes considered super-human, but it is still a benchmark coveted by any middle-distance runner who has pulled on a pair of spikes. 

That is why the mile will never lose its magic.