Companions in Belgravia: eight plates within a walk of Chester Square

Picture a Thursday in October. A guest on Beeston Place has spent the afternoon at a christening in Chelsea and messages Rosie at half past seven: something relaxed, three hours, beginning at nine. Rosie answers with a pair of names and an hour, and the guest picks Patricia. She is in the lounge at five to nine, a cardigan over one arm for the walk later, and they take a first drink looking out over the hotel's garden.

Supper is a ten minute walk away on Elizabeth Street, upstairs at The Thomas Cubitt, its tall windows looking down on the lamplit pavement. Afterwards they walk back to the hotel the long way, round Eaton Square beneath the plane trees, past lit drawing rooms and the odd chauffeur reading a paper at the wheel. By midnight she is in a car heading home, and the square is as quiet as she found it. Three hours, £1,050, and not a single thing for the guest to organise.

Four stations lie within an easy walk of the squares. Victoria, the great terminus with three Tube lines beneath it, is about 5 minutes on foot from the middle of the district. The western squares sit roughly 6 minutes from the Circle and District platforms at Sloane Square. Belgrave Square is some 7 minutes from the Piccadilly line at Hyde Park Corner, and Wilton Crescent around 8 minutes from Knightsbridge, one stop further along that same line.

Your companion will not be taking any of them. Evenings mean a car to the kerb, and because Belgravia lies deep inside Zone 1, the ride costs you nothing on top.

Three companions live inside the district and several more just beyond it, which keeps the choice wide on a late evening. The clock is another matter: allow about an hour from Rosie's confirmation to the knock, more when Grosvenor Place is solid at rush hour, and watch the chat, where Rosie posts the exact time as your companion sets off. Name a later time instead and she arrives on it. The checks are short. Rosie needs three things, sent once: the surname your suite is registered to, which hotel, which room; for a house on the squares, the number and whoever's name is on the bell. Nobody rings reception. On arrival your companion receives her fee from you personally, the same figure Rosie put in writing.

For a four hour dinner at £1,300 or a ten hour overnight at £2,400, writing by mid-afternoon keeps the most faces open to you.

Across Sloane Street, Knightsbridge trades stucco for red brick and quiet for shop windows. South of Eaton Square, the Pimlico grid carries Cubitt's terraces down towards the river. East, beyond the Palace wall, the hotels around Victoria wait for the Gatwick trains, while the boutiques of Sloane Street line the western edge. If you are unsure which page your address belongs to, the SW1 overview gathers them all in one place.