The last quiet pour: SW1 nightcaps, from garden lounges to mews taverns

There is a particular sound to Belgravia late at night, which is to say almost none at all. The squares empty, the carriage lamps glow over black doors, and the loudest thing on Eaton Place is a taxi ticking over while somebody looks for their keys. Nobody comes here for a big night out, and that is exactly why it is the best corner of London for a nightcap: the final drink, taken slowly, in a room where you can hear the ice settle.

The rhythm of the district is simple. The mews pubs stop serving at a sensible hour, and after that the hotel bars carry the night, some keeping their latest service for their own residents. A good plan therefore starts in a tavern and finishes in a lounge, or begins and ends in the hotel where you are staying. Either way, the walk between the two, through streets of white stucco and black railings, is half the point.

If one room defines the quiet nightcap in SW1, it is the bar and lounge at SW1W 0JW, tucked behind Victoria and still in the hands of the family that opened it. The lounge looks out onto the hotel's private garden, and late in the evening, with lamps lit inside and the lawn dark beyond the glass, it feels like the drawing room of a country house that happens to stand a few streets from Buckingham Palace.

Service is old-fashioned in the best sense. A drink arrives before you have quite finished deciding, the armchairs are deep, and nobody has ever been hurried towards the door. Patricia, who lives in Belgravia and is rarely far from Eaton Square, likes this lounge at the start of an evening, but it is just as lovely at the close of one. She is one of the three auburn portraits in the edit, gentle and attentive, and quite likely to sketch the garden on a napkin while you talk.

For an earlier nightcap, before the pubs call time, The Star Tavern waits in Belgrave Mews West, a cobbled lane behind Belgrave Square reached through an opening most passers-by never notice. It is an old pub with a handsome room upstairs, and it carries one of the neighbourhood's more colourful stories: this is where the Great Train Robbery is said to have been planned in the early 1960s. True or not, it gives any conversation an easy first line.

The Star also makes a useful meeting point, walkable from SW1X 7RL, SW1X 7TA and the Knightsbridge hotels alike. A companion can find you at the bar without fuss and then walk on with you to wherever the last glass is waiting. The other mews pubs of the village, around Kinnerton Street and Wilton Row, appear in our piece on the suppers of Motcomb Street.

On the western edge of the postcode, Sloane Street keeps two very different hotel rooms a short stroll apart. At SW1X 9PY on Cadogan Place, the Chinoiserie lounge is all deep chairs and soft light, a place to watch a room without being watched. Milena, one of the statuesque set, likes to open an evening there; late at night, with the shoppers long gone, it is calmer still.

Further south, SW1X 9SG has the longer memory. Lillie Langtry once lived in part of the building, and it was here, in April 1895, that Oscar Wilde was arrested. The bar today is a civilised place for a glass at midnight, a few streets from Sloane Square, with enough literary ghosts in the walls to keep a conversation going until closing.

If your hotel sits on the political side of the postcode, Westminster has nightcaps with a character of their own. SW1H 0QW on Caxton Street, behind its curving forecourt, spent the war years as a haunt of the intelligence services, and its Caxton Bar still trades gently on that atmosphere: a good room for a quiet drink and a better story. Closer to the river, the Bassoon Bar on Whitehall Place runs a long counter modelled on the instrument, often with a pianist at the keys.

Tina knows the Bassoon well. One of the toned portraits, calm, practical and quick with a joke, she will usually propose a turn along the Embankment afterwards, when the Thames runs black and the lamps along the wall shiver in it. For guests of the Whitehall and Victoria Street hotels, that is a gentle end to a long working day.

A nightcap is the one occasion where a single hour, at £400, genuinely feels generous: a drink, a long talk and a short walk back to your door. If you want the tavern and the lounge both, ninety minutes at £600 gives the stroll between them room to breathe. Rosie reads late messages as readily as early ones, and there is no night rate anywhere on the rates page; an arrival at midnight costs exactly what it would at eight.

Tell her where you will be sitting, and whether you would prefer to meet at the bar or in your own rooms afterwards. When the evening is spent at your hotel or your house from start to finish, the suite and townhouse calls page describes how she comes to you. Either way the aim is the same: the last pour of the night, in good company, somewhere nobody needs to raise their voice.