Escorts in Albemarle Street, W1S: who is close, and how soon
Albemarle Street leaves Piccadilly heading north into Mayfair, runs straight between Dover Street and Old Bond Street, and ends at Grafton Street. It is a short W1S street of art dealers behind plate glass, the columned front of the Royal Institution at No. 21, the old house of a publisher where Byron's memoirs were burned in 1824, and flats and offices above them all. The name comes from the second Duke of Albemarle, who bought the great house that stood here before the land was sold for building in the 1680s. Albemarle Street escorts arrive on a street that notices noise far more readily than it notices people.
The street is home to nobody on the board, while Mayfair around it houses three of the names, so the office quotes its ordinary central figure for escorts in Albemarle Street, about an hour counted from its confirmation and longer when Piccadilly is at a standstill, the precise time following by message and the lengths set out on the rates. The rest is about the street itself: what it has expected of its callers for two centuries, and why somebody arriving after dark goes unremarked here.
On the ground
Albemarle Street in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameW1S 4BP, W1J 9BR, W1B 4DY, W1J 8LT, W1S 2YF.
Nearest stations
Walking timeGreen Park, 2 minutes. Piccadilly Circus, 6 minutes. Bond Street, 9 minutes.
Getting there
W1STravel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Albemarle Street
Who works here
On the board in Albemarle Street
The eight prints above are a first shortlist for Albemarle Street tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
Doors that open to a bell
By day Albemarle Street does its business behind glass. A dealer shows a single canvas or a few objects in the window, the door is often kept shut, and a visitor who wants to look closer rings and is let in. Nobody on the pavement pays attention to who goes through which door, and nobody expects to be told. It is a street that takes the privacy of a closed door for granted, and that habit is the first thing to understand about arriving here at any hour.
Note 03
Evening callers since 1799
The Royal Institution has stood at No. 21 since 1799, and it taught the street early how to absorb a crowd of evening callers. In the first years of the nineteenth century Humphry Davy's lectures there were among the most fashionable events in London, and the carriages bringing his audiences jammed the street so badly that it was made one way, a change often described as the first one-way street in the capital.
The giant Corinthian columns went up across the front in 1838, and they still make No. 21 the one address on the street that nobody has to search for. Everything else here is quieter about itself.
Note 04
A speaker kept behind a closed door
Michael Faraday, who worked in the building for most of his life, began its Friday Evening Discourses in 1826, and they gave the street one of its best stories about nerves. In 1846 Charles Wheatstone, due to speak, lost his courage at the last moment and left the building. Faraday went on in his place and filled the hour himself, and ever since the speaker has been kept apart in a room before the talk begins, so that nobody can repeat the escape.
It is a very Albemarle Street kind of rule: private, a little theatrical, and never announced to the audience waiting in the seats.
Note 05
The drawing room at No. 50
The publisher John Murray moved into No. 50 in 1812, and the house became one of the most literary addresses in London. Byron was published from it, and so were Jane Austen's Emma and, later, Darwin's On the Origin of Species; Byron and Walter Scott first met there in 1815.
The street's most famous act of discretion happened in the same drawing room. In May 1824, weeks after Byron's death, Murray and a small circle of the poet's friends and his family's representatives decided that his memoirs should never be read, and the manuscript was torn up and burned in the fireplace. Whatever it said went up the chimney of a house on this street, and no other copy has ever come to light.
Note 06
What the street hears after dark
Once the dealers dim their windows, the street belongs to the people who live above them, to late workers leaving offices and, on lecture nights, to the audience coming out of No. 21. The fronts are tall and close together, so sound carries, and the one thing that earns a look is noise: a car door slammed, a telephone call on speaker, a taxi idling under a bedroom window with its radio on. Somebody walking up the pavement to a door, with nothing to say to anyone, is simply part of the street.
Note 07
The covered way to Old Bond Street
On the east side, the Royal Arcade opens a covered passage through to Old Bond Street. Built in 1879, it is a short Victorian run of small shopfronts under a glass roof, and in shop hours it is the sheltered way between the two streets, out of the rain and out of the stream of people on Piccadilly. By evening the shops behind its windows have closed, and the street outside is the way round.
Note 08
Plain doors between the windows
Between the gallery fronts are plainer doors that lead upstairs, to offices and to flats above the dealers. They are easy to walk past, which is rather the point: on this street the address that matters is often the one without a sign. After dark a visitor heads for one of them the way a dinner guest would, without looking round, and the street takes no notice. If the evening moves on, Dover Street runs parallel to the west, and Green Park lies across Piccadilly at the southern end.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Albemarle Street
Asked most often
Albemarle Street, asked and answered
Is it usual to ring before walking into a gallery here?
Why were Byron's memoirs burned on this street?
Why is the Friday speaker at the Royal Institution kept in a room beforehand?
Where does the covered passage off the street lead?
One zone either way
Next along from Albemarle Street
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.