Escorts in W2, from Brunel's train shed to the last lit tower
In December the daylight leaves W2 before four, and the hour after is the best time to look at it: cream stucco going blue-grey under the street lamps, railings laying their shadows across the front steps, and the glazed roof over Paddington's platforms lit from within like a lantern left on in a warehouse.
Escorts in W2 are booked into a postcode built in layers: a late Georgian and early Victorian estate of squares and terraces laid over the fields north of the park, a railway set down in the middle of it, and a handful of later buildings that answer both. Her cab to any address in the postcode sits inside the fee, as the rates set out, leaving the journey free for looking out of the window.
Hotels across W2
Buildings our companions know by the lobby and the lift, in and around W2.
- W2 2TYLancaster Gate
- W2 1EEPaddington
- W2 1JUEdgware Road
- W2 4RJBayswater
- W2 4DUNotting Hill
Given by postcode as landmarks only. None of these hotels is a partner and the desk holds no arrangement with any of them; serviced apartments and private addresses are booked in exactly the same way.
Nearest stations
Walking minutes from each platform into W2, for guests arriving by train and for timing the evening.
- PaddingtonBakerloo, Circle, District, Hammersmith and City, Elizabeth line, National Rail2MIN
- Lancaster GateCentral5MIN
- BayswaterCircle, District8MIN
Heading to W2
Companions the desk can send to W2 on any evening she is free. The full list is on Tonight.
Nora
Vanessa
Laura
Luna
Margo
Milena
Patricia
Rosa
Iron, glass and a printed sky
Paddington's train shed is Brunel's, opened in 1854: great spans of wrought iron and glass crossed by transepts, with the ornament drawn by Matthew Digby Wyatt. Look up from the concourse and the ribs run away down the platforms like the nave of a church built for engines. Next door, the Elizabeth line station sits in a long box alongside Eastbourne Terrace, roofed by a glass canopy printed with Spencer Finch's pictures of clouds, so the escalators go down under a sky that never changes its weather.
Tyburnia, the bishop's grid
Between the station and the park lies Tyburnia, the Bishop of London's estate, laid out from the 1820s and named after the Tyburn gallows that stood near today's Marble Arch. It went up in the same years as Belgravia and in the same cream stucco: Hyde Park Square, Gloucester Square and Connaught Square, pillared porches, black railings. Westbourne Terrace is its grand avenue, broad and straight, with paired terraces facing each other across the carriageway, and St James's, Paddington's Victorian Gothic parish church, stands on Sussex Gardens.
Two houses that are not there
At 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, in an otherwise respectable Bayswater terrace, two front doors open onto nothing. The facades, their windows painted over, went up in the 1860s to screen the open cutting where the underground railway runs between Paddington and Bayswater, and from Porchester Terrace behind, their bare backs are plain to see. Towards Marble Arch, number 10 Hyde Park Place, next to the Tyburn Convent, is often called the narrowest house in London, a little over a yard across.
A dome, a lone spire and a post-war reply
West of Queensway, St Sophia on Moscow Road is London's Greek Orthodox cathedral, a domed Byzantine-style church of the 1870s by John Oldrid Scott with a mosaic interior. At Lancaster Gate the two tall stucco terraces were built around a church of which only the spire still stands, the rest replaced by flats. And off Bishop's Bridge Road, the Hallfield Estate, designed by Tecton and completed by Lindsay Drake and Denys Lasdun in the 1950s, set pale slab blocks with patterned facades among lawns: the post-war reply to the stucco all around it.
Asked about W2
Westbourne Terrace, for sheer width and length, and the Tyburnia squares, Gloucester Square among them, for proportion. See either as the lamps come on, when the porches and railings are at their most theatrical.
Yes. The concourse is open to anyone, and a few minutes standing where the transepts cross the spans is enough to take in the whole design. It costs nothing to look at.
At 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, a few streets from Bayswater station. From the pavement they pass for houses at a glance; the giveaway is the painted windows. Porchester Terrace shows you the back.
The Hallfield Estate, for post-war housing at its most careful; the Elizabeth line canopy at Paddington; and the moving footbridges of Paddington Basin, Heatherwick's Rolling Bridge, which curls up into an octagon, and the Fan Bridge, which lifts its ribs like a hand fan.
Next on the board
SL4 6AN and 2 more on the venue board · Windsor and Eton Central 6 min on foot
From the dispatches
- 01 · 6 min readThe twenty minute advantage: from City Airport's runway to an evening on the WharfLondon City puts you down a short ride from the towers, so most of the evening survives the flight. How the transfer works, when to message the desk, and three evenings built around a flight number.
- 02 · 5 min readBy river to dinner: the boat from Westferry Circus, and where it can carry an eveningThe river bus leaves from a pier at the foot of the estate and reaches Greenwich, the Tower and the West End by water. Boarding, the best seat, the piers that suit a date and the ride home.
The rest of the board
Every district on the board sits on one page: the full coverage map.
W2, lights on
Tell the desk which building in W2 and when the evening starts. The reply names a companion and the minute she arrives.