As you head east from 1st Circle, Rainbow Street – named after the Rainbow Cinema on the right – is lined with shops and boutiques preceding the walled and gated British Council. Beyond here, the street dips sharply; partway along on the left is a mosque with a fine old minaret, while an anonymous-looking town house on a minor street to the right, with a dark shade of plaster and curved Art Deco-style balcony railings, was where King Talal lived for a time before his accession, and where both the late King Hussein and his brother Prince Hassan were born.

Two of the most attractive villas in the area, both well signposted, are beside each other just off Rainbow Street about 250m east of the British Council. On the corner is an elegant symmetrical villa set back from the street and faced in local stone, with a stepped portico and tall, slender windows, that's now used as showrooms for the crafts of Jordan River Designs and Bani Hamida. Alongside it is an even more attractive one-storey villa – home to Major Alec Kirkbride, the first British Ambassador to Jordan, among others – with a beautiful portico of pointed arches, wrought-iron window-bars, and a lovely garden centred on a star-shaped fountain. Both these houses were built in the late 1920s by Salim al-Odat, an architect originally from Karak. Just round the corner with Asfour Street is a pair of houses built for Egyptian businessman and adviser to Emir Abdullah Ismail Bilbaysi, a smaller one dating from the 1930s with a semi circular balcony featuring a lavishly painted ceiling visible from the street, and beside it a much larger villa designed in the 1940s in a consciously medieval Mamluke style, with bands of alternating pink and white stone and pointed arches.

Continuing down Rainbow Street past the one-time headquarters of the Jordanian Communist Party, you come to the distinctively modernistic Mango House on the right, at the corner with Omar bin al-Khattab Street (aka Mango Street). In smooth, reddish stone with curving, pillared balconies, it was built in the late 1940s by Kamal and Ali Mango, members of one of Amman's most prominent business dynasties. On the other side of Rainbow Street is a long, low house, the whole facade of which is sheltered beneath an elegant Circassian-style porticoed balcony; its most famous resident was Said al-Mufti, a Circassian who was prime minister in the 1950s and also mayor of Amman. Following Mango Street to the right for 100m or so brings you to Books@Café, an attractive bookshop and café shoehorned into another historic old house.