A district is a direction
Guests writing to the desk for the first time very often say where they are the way they would say it to a friend: in Mayfair, near Oxford Street, just off Covent Garden. It is a perfectly natural way to describe a place and almost useless for getting somebody to a door. Mayfair runs from Oxford Street to Piccadilly and from Park Lane to Regent Street, and the walk from one corner to the other is a good quarter of an hour. Oxford Street is nearly two kilometres long. Covent Garden, depending on who is saying it, can mean anywhere from Seven Dials to the Strand.
A district tells a companion which way to set off. It does not tell her which station to use, which exit to take, which side of the road to walk on or which door to go through when she arrives. Every one of those is a small decision, and every one made without the building is a guess. Across a whole journey the guesses add up to about ten minutes, which is the difference between somebody arriving at the minute you were promised and somebody ringing to ask which way the entrance faces.
W1 changes letter every few hundred metres
The W1 postcode looks like one place on a map and behaves like a dozen. W1K covers the Grosvenor Square end of Mayfair, where a grand house sits on Brook Street. W1J runs along Piccadilly past the arcaded corner. W1S takes in Albemarle Street, Savile Row and a hotel that runs through to Dover Street. W1B is Regent Street and Portland Place, with another opposite Broadcasting House. W1D and W1F divide Soho between them, W1T and W1W divide Fitzrovia, W1U and W1G split Marylebone between the high street and Harley Street, and W1H takes the streets behind Marble Arch.
That is why a postcode on its own is only a little better than a district name. W1 by itself covers most of the western half of the zone. Even the full postcode, which is precise, is not the same thing as a door, because the front of a building and the address on its letterhead are not always on the same street. The building, with the street its entrance is on, is the thing that actually gets somebody across the last hundred metres. It matters everywhere in Central London, and most of all in W1.
Names that send people to the wrong door
London hotels have a habit of borrowing grander names from their neighbours. Several hotels carry the words Park Lane, and they are strung out along a road more than a kilometre long with Hyde Park Corner at one end and Marble Arch at the other. One hotel carries St James in its name and stands in Westminster beside St James’s Park station, while the district of St James’s, with its clubs and Jermyn Street, is on the other side of the park altogether. A guest who writes St James and nothing else has given a choice of two quite different journeys.
Then there are the buildings whose door is not where the address suggests. W1J 9BR has a Piccadilly address, but the door guests actually use is round the corner on Arlington Street. W1S 4BP runs through from Albemarle Street to Dover Street. WC1V 7EN is reached through a carriage arch off High Holborn into a courtyard, and WC2R 0EZ through its own short forecourt off the Strand. None of this is difficult once it is known. All of it costs minutes when it is not.
What the building actually saves
With the name of the building and the street, the desk can plan the last stretch properly: the right station, the right exit, the walk measured in minutes, the door she will go through. That plan is what makes the arrival time in your confirmation a minute rather than a window. It is also what lets the single check before she sets off, the name the reservation carries along with the building and the room number, happen once and be finished with.
Hotel and flat arrivals all run on that basis, from £250 for the hour. Nothing about the figure changes with the building; only the accuracy of the time does. Nobody at the hotel is involved at any point, and no hotel named on this site has ever been approached for any kind of arrangement. She crosses the lobby as your guest, takes the lift and knocks, and what happens in the minutes after that is described in the note on the first ten minutes of a first evening.
Flats: the street, the block, the floor
Private addresses need the same precision and a little more. Mansion blocks in Marylebone and Fitzrovia often have more than one entrance, sometimes on different streets, and a number on its own will not say which. Mews houses tucked behind the main roads can be hard to find in the dark even with a map.
So the desk asks for the street, the block, the floor, and whether the door has a porter behind it or an entryphone. The zone is split roughly evenly between the two, and knowing which one to expect saves a confused minute in a hallway. If there is anything odd about the approach, a side gate, a code, a lift that only works with a fob, say so in the same message. It is read once and kept no longer than the evening.
Four lines that work
A good first message is short. Nine tonight, two hours, W1B 1JA on Portland Place, and a name if you have one. Nothing more is needed, and nothing is left for the desk to guess. If the name is Liana, who lives on the western side of Marylebone, the reply may well come back with a fifteen minute walk rather than a train. If it is Patricia, crossing from Belgravia, the reply will say twenty five minutes and mean it. If it is Karolina and your hotel is in Covent Garden, she may be at the door before the drinks you ordered.
All three belong to the late twenties part of the index, and all three are the kind of company that notices whether a journey was well planned. Give the building, and you will find that nobody notices the journey at all.
Cross filed: most of the names in this piece also sit under slim and slender in the the index.