The Spread: the middle of London, written down in minutes

The Spread is the desk's notebook, opened to anybody who cares to read it. Every evening arranged here depends on a handful of facts that never appear on a map: how long the walk really is from Green Park to a door in St James's Place, which hour the roads across the zone seize up, which station will take a suitcase without a single stair, how long after the curtain falls the Strand becomes passable again. Those facts are the working material of every confirmation Romilly sends, and The Spread is simply the place they are set out at length, for anybody planning an evening before the first message is written.

It opens with ten notes. Four are about time and distance: the walk from Marble Arch to Chancery Lane taken leg by leg, the two slowest hours to cross the middle of London, the stations that work with luggage, and why a building gets somebody to your door faster than a district. Three are about particular rooms and tables, from six Mayfair pairings of a bar and a dining room four minutes apart to the conservatory on King Street and the quiet approach on Whitehall Place. The rest cover the hotels a car cannot quite reach, the quarter past ten spill in Covent Garden, and the first ten minutes of a first evening, told plainly for anybody who has never done this before.

A few rules hold throughout. Places are named because guests go to them, never because of any arrangement, and no hotel, bar or restaurant on these pages has one with this house. Opening hours and prices are left out, because they change and a wrong one is worse than none. Walking times are the desk's own working figures at an unhurried evening pace.

Each note links on to the districts on Zone One, to the companions on On The Books whose evenings run that way, and to the figures on the rates page, which open at £250 for the hour and hold for every name and every address in the zone. Read whichever matches the evening you already have in mind, then send the desk four lines.