Sloane Square, SW1W and SW3: the small hotels and their drawing rooms

A square with a theatre on one corner

The square itself is small, planted, and permanently busy at its edges. The Royal Court holds the eastern corner and sets the rhythm of the whole evening around here: tables fill before the curtain and fill again the moment it comes down. Peter Jones occupies the west side. The fountain in the middle is the meeting point everybody defaults to, and it is genuinely useful for that.

Three roads run out of it. Sloane Street climbs north in shop windows towards Knightsbridge. The King's Road goes west and stays awake longer than anything else in this postcode. Lower Sloane Street drops south towards the river and the bridge. Behind all three lie the red brick mansion blocks and the garden squares, Cadogan Gardens above all, that give the district its residential half.

It is a walking quarter. Nearly everything an evening here needs, a table, a curtain, a late coffee, a front door, sits within a few hundred yards of the fountain, which is why bookings in SW1W and SW3 so often run longer than the guest first intended.

Four houses and a front door

SW3 2RJ is four Victorian houses joined together, with a drawing room, a small bar and no reception desk worth the name. SW3 2RP is its near neighbour and gives residents a key to the private garden behind it. SW1X 9SG stands on Sloane Street with its own history and a garden it shares with Cadogan Place. SW1X 9PY is the one large house of the group, ten minutes north up Sloane Street.

Not one of them has any arrangement with this house, and none would be told about a booking in any case. A companion arrives as your guest, and in hotels this size that is not merely tactful but practical: everybody in the building can see everybody else, so nothing is ever staged.

Private addresses are at least as common here. A mansion flat behind a porter on Cadogan Gardens, a house on a Chelsea side street, a flat above a shop on the King's Road. Delphine takes the street, the number, the floor and whatever the entrance needs, and nothing further.

One minute to the District line, and why it is not used

Sloane Square station is on the square itself, about 1 minute from the fountain, with the Circle and District lines beneath it. Victoria is roughly 10 minutes away on foot, which many people do after the theatre. South Kensington is some 12 minutes west, past the top of Sloane Avenue.

Your companion travels by car and is set down at the door, whatever the station map says, and because SW1W and SW3 are central her journey is inside the figure already. An address further out than the second fare zone adds a taxi fare both ways, quoted as one sum before you confirm, and never afterwards.

The fee passes directly to your companion when she arrives, at the figure Delphine wrote down. Moving the hour is free where you give three hours of warning or more; from two hours out, half of what was agreed stands, and an evening nobody appears for carries the whole of it. Fifteen minutes of grace sit on the start.

Curtain up, and the hours either side

A great many bookings here are shaped by the Royal Court. Two hours at £500 covers a table before the curtain and a drink after it. Three at £700 covers the play with a proper dinner on the far side, which is the version most people wish they had chosen.

The other pattern is the long Saturday afternoon that turns into an evening without anyone deciding it should: the King's Road, a late lunch, a gallery, then supper. Daylight is priced exactly as darkness is, and Delphine is at the switchboard from the morning on.

Three who treat this square as their own

Cindy takes the window seats where the awning frames the plane trees and stays through two coffees after the plates have gone. Milena likes to be here at eight, at a table facing the square, and walks down towards the river afterwards. Stacy builds the whole evening around the Royal Court, reads the programme properly before the lights go down, and will argue about the second act over a late dinner.

Lea, Patricia and Violetta come across from Belgravia in a few minutes. Any other name in the Salon attends this square on the same tariff.

The streets leading out of the square

North east, past Cadogan Place, the Belgravia squares begin almost immediately and keep going in white stucco. Straight up Sloane Street, the Knightsbridge shop fronts take about ten minutes on foot and rather less by car. The eastern half of this ground shares its postcode with the wider SW1 addresses, which is the page to read if your address begins that way. Chelsea proper lies west along the King's Road, and the river is a short walk south past Chelsea Bridge.