Where the car stops
Most hotels in the middle of London are built to receive cars. There is a forecourt or a canopy, a doorman who opens the door before the engine has stopped, and a pavement wide enough to stand a suitcase on. A few are not. They sit in yards behind the street, at the end of narrow mews, or in courtyards reached down a cul de sac, and the car that brings you either stops at the corner or noses in and then has to find its way back out.
Guests sometimes treat that as an inconvenience. The desk treats it as an advantage, for reasons that come down to arithmetic. When the last stretch of a journey is on foot, it takes the same number of minutes every time. When it is in a car, it takes however long the one way streets, the delivery vans and the other cars decide it takes. The hotels below are the ones where the last fifty metres are walked, and they happen to produce the most punctual arrivals on the whole of the desk's clock.
The yard off Great Windmill Street
One hotel is set around a planted courtyard just off Great Windmill Street, two or three minutes from Piccadilly Circus station, and its front door faces the yard rather than a road. In practice a car sets you down at the mouth of the yard and the rest is a short walk across paving under the trees. Inside, the hotel is richly patterned in the way its owners are known for, with a roof terrace above and, improbably, a small bowling alley below.
For an arrival it is almost ideal. A companion coming up at Piccadilly Circus walks the same few streets every time, past the back of the theatres, and reaches the door within a minute of the time she was given. The yard itself is quiet in a way the streets around it are not, which makes the last minute before the knock unusually calm for the middle of Soho.
Up a mews off Dean Street
Another sits at the end of Richmond Mews, a short dead end off Dean Street, and it keeps a large bronze cat by Fernando Botero in its lobby, which is the kind of detail you remember when you are trying to describe the place later. A car can turn into the mews, but on a busy evening Dean Street is slow, the mews is narrow and there is little room to turn round, so most drivers stop at the corner and let their passengers walk the last few yards.
On foot the approach is straightforward. From Tottenham Court Road it is about five minutes, by way of Soho Square and Dean Street; from Leicester Square it is a little longer. The walk is the same at seven as it is at eleven, and the arrival time given for it is correspondingly reliable.
Two houses down St James’s Place
St James's Place runs off St James's Street and, for a car, simply stops, and at its far end SW1A 1NY sits in its own small courtyard, lit by lamps and as quiet at ten o’clock as at noon. Its bar is famous for its martinis, mixed at a trolley beside you, and for a long association with Ian Fleming, who is said to have drunk there. SW1A 1NJ is a few doors back along the same street, with its American Bar and a mews of old stables behind.
Neither is difficult to reach, but both sit at the closed end of a cul de sac in the most tightly built quarter of St James's, and a car spends as long threading down to them as a person spends walking from Green Park. Out of the station, along Piccadilly, down St James's Street and right into the Place: about five minutes, and the pavement is never crowded enough to slow anybody down. It is one of the few arrivals in the zone that no amount of traffic can delay.
Why the walk makes the minute
A journey across the middle of London has two parts. The first, by train or car, varies with the hour: between seven and nine the roads are slow, after ten they are quick, and a car's time in between is anybody's guess. The second, the final few hundred metres, is where most of the uncertainty hides. A car in Soho can spend four minutes on a one way loop to reach a door it could see from the corner. A person on foot simply walks up to it.
So for these hotels the desk plans the arrival around the station and the walk. Piccadilly Circus to the yard, Tottenham Court Road to Richmond Mews, Green Park to St James’s Place: each is a fixed number of minutes, and the confirmation you receive is built from those minutes. Hotel and flat arrivals run this way across the whole zone, from £250 for the hour, but it is at doors like these that the method shows best.
The opposite case
Some of the grandest hotels in the zone go the other way and bring the car all the way in. The carriage arch on High Holborn leads straight into a courtyard, and the short forecourt off the Strand is where, famously, cars keep to the right. Both are wonderful for luggage and neither makes a person arrive any sooner, because the car still has to reach the arch first.
If you are curious how much of the middle of London is quicker on foot than it looks, the note on walking from Marble Arch to Chancery Lane times the whole spine of the zone leg by leg. For most of it, feet win or tie.
Company who arrives on foot
Some of the women on the list walk to almost everything. Jasmin lives in Soho and measures the district in streets rather than minutes; The yard and Richmond Mews are both a short stroll from her door. Tiffany, also Soho based, is the name for a late booking at either. Lea is the one for St James's Place, fond of old rooms and older service, and quite happy to walk the last stretch from Green Park in whatever shoes the evening calls for.
Jasmin, Tiffany and Lea all appear on the petite page of the index. For these hotels, though, the useful thing to say in your message is simply the name of the building. The desk will know where the car stops, and so will she.
Cross filed: most of the names in this piece also sit under petite in the the index.