Mayfair, W1K and W1J: an evening arranged down to the hour

Grosvenor Square down to Shepherd Market

The quarter is small enough to be learned properly, and the companions who live here have learned it. Grosvenor Square caps the northern end, its lawns filling with office coats at six and emptied again within the hour. Mount Street runs west from Berkeley Square in a line of pink terracotta, picture dealers and a florist behind the glass, with Mount Street Gardens kept quiet behind the church for anyone who wants five minutes out of the traffic.

Below Curzon Street the grain of the place changes entirely. Shepherd Market is a knot of narrow lanes with pubs, small kitchens and tables put out the moment the weather allows, and it is the only corner of W1J that behaves like a village rather than an estate. East of it, Half Moon Street and Clarges Street climb to Piccadilly in terraces that are now mostly flats above small offices.

The useful thing about all of this is that an evening in Mayfair does not need a car between courses. A table on Conduit Street, a drink on Carlos Place and a lobby on Brook Street are a few minutes apart in good shoes, which is why our companions here tend to propose walking and mean it.

The doors we are given most often

Delphine keeps a plain list of the addresses guests write from, and in Mayfair the same names come round week upon week. Brook Street, W1K 4HR, black and white marble and a hall porter who has seen every kind of evening twice over. W1K 2AL, quieter, set back into Carlos Place behind the fountain. Albemarle Street, W1S 4BP, the oldest of them, with a tea room that fills every afternoon of the year.

Towards the park stand W1K 1QA behind its plane trees and, facing the same trees, W1K 1PN. At the Piccadilly end, W1J 9BR, where the dining room still has a view about jackets and ties that is worth reading before you reserve a table.

This house has no understanding with any of those hotels and has never looked for one. Your companion arrives as your guest, crosses to the lift the way a guest crosses to a lift, and has no business at the desk. Plenty of Mayfair bookings are not hotels at all: a flat on Davies Street, a lateral apartment behind a porter who has admitted forty visitors already that day. Those run precisely as a suite does.

Minutes on foot, and why she will not be walking

Green Park lies roughly 4 minutes from the Curzon Street end, with the Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria lines beneath it. Bond Street is about 5 minutes from Grosvenor Square, carrying the Central and Jubilee lines and the Elizabeth line besides. Hyde Park Corner sits some 7 minutes from the western edge, on the Piccadilly line alone.

Those minutes are for you rather than for her. A companion comes to Mayfair by car and is set down at the door you name, and because the whole quarter lies inside the first two fare zones there is nothing added to the figure for her journey. An address past the second zone is a different matter: Delphine works the taxi in both directions into one written total, and you see that total before anything is agreed.

Notice is the only thing that genuinely changes what is possible. Write in the afternoon and the evening stands open. Write near midnight and she will still come, though the choice narrows to whoever the day book has left. Whatever the hour, your companion takes the fee from you herself at the door, and it is the same figure Delphine had already put in writing.

Who writes from W1K and W1J

Guests here are seldom in a hurry, which suits this house exactly. A good number are in town for a week or more on business and would far rather one long, properly arranged evening than three abbreviated ones. Others keep a flat in the quarter, use it a dozen times a year, and want the arrangement handled the same way each time without a fresh explanation.

A third sort writes for something specific and dated: a sale at the auction rooms, a private view on Cork Street, a dinner for eight that somebody else booked, where arriving alone invites exactly the questions nobody cares to answer. Delphine takes those bookings weeks ahead and confirms the hour in writing rather than leaving anyone to assume it.

Three who live among these blocks

Angelika keeps her evenings close to Mount Street and is happiest at a marble counter with something cold in the glass. Luna lives five minutes from Carlos Place and would rather sit at a bar than at a table, watching a drink be made properly. Samanta is a Conduit Street creature, dressed with an architect's discipline, and will walk you into Savile Row afterwards to argue about a shop window.

Others are close by without living here. Karolina crosses from Covent Garden for a viewing on New Bond Street, and Nora comes down the Bayswater Road for a long dinner on the park side of Park Lane. Living nearby only shortens a journey: every woman in the Salon attends Mayfair on the same tariff.

The addresses that border this one

West, past the first of the Park Lane kerbs, the Park Lane hotel row faces Hyde Park across six lanes of traffic. South east, the plane trees of Berkeley Square mark where Mayfair dines late. North east, the W1S blocks around Bond Street fill with daylight appointments rather than dinners. And at the Piccadilly corner, the Green Park side of the district takes the guests who have just come in from an airport. If you are unsure which of these pages your own address belongs to, the list of addresses gathers every one of them.