Escorts in Limehouse, E14: who is close, and how soon
Twenty to midnight on Narrow Street. The last drinkers have come out of the riverside pubs and gone their separate ways, the tide is running hard past the back walls, and across the water the lamps of Rotherhithe make a thin line of light under a very black sky. A taxi idles by a warehouse door, a couple walk slowly towards the basin, and the only loud thing for half a mile is the wind off the river. This is Limehouse after ten, a district with a lurid night-time reputation that it has long since outgrown, and escorts in Limehouse meet the quiet version. She comes east from her home in town, so the gap between the office confirming and her knock is usually about an hour, sometimes more late on a Friday; the thread shows her precise time once she is moving, and the rates hold each length.
On the ground
Limehouse in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameE14 8RS, E14 4ED.
Nearest stations
Walking timeLimehouse, 2 minutes. Westferry, 5 minutes. West India Quay, 9 minutes.
Getting there
E14Travel 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 Limehouse
Who works here
On the board in Limehouse
The six prints above are a first shortlist for Limehouse tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
The pubs on the river, and what stays open
Narrow Street is the district's late evening, such as it is. A short run of old pubs stands along it with their back rooms right over the Thames, and one of them, the Grapes, is widely taken to be the tavern Dickens turned into the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend, a narrow old house of low ceilings and dark panelling with the river right outside. On a winter night, with the windows steamed and the water rushing past below, it is hard to think of a better room in east London in which to sit out the last hour.
After the pubs call time, Limehouse has very little that stays open, and that is rather the point. There are no clubs, no late bars worth crossing town for and almost no passing trade. The streets behind the river are terraces, warehouse flats and low blocks, their residents mostly in bed, and anyone still out walking is usually on the way home. For an evening with Limehouse escorts, the late hours suit a flat by the water or a room a stop to the east far better than a crawl of bars.
Note 03
Limehouse Nights, and the real ones
The district's night-time reputation was made in print. In 1916 Thomas Burke published Limehouse Nights, a collection of stories set among the sailors, lodging houses and back streets of the riverside, and a few years later D. W. Griffith turned one of them into the film Broken Blossoms. Popular fiction of the period went further, filling Limehouse with opium dens and sinister villains that owed far more to the writers' imaginations than to anything in the streets.
The truth was smaller and more interesting. London's first Chinatown did grow up here, in Pennyfields and along Limehouse Causeway, among sailors who came off the Chinese ships in the docks and stayed to open laundries, cafés and boarding houses. Wartime bombing and the clearances that followed took most of it away, and Chinatown later settled in Soho instead. A few street names are all that remain, and walking them late at night, among modern flats and quiet corners, it takes an effort to imagine the fog-bound Limehouse of the stories at all.
Note 04
How the streets feel after ten
Calm, mostly, and oddly spacious. The towers of Canary Wharf stand lit to the east, close enough to fill the skyline and far enough away that none of their noise arrives. St Anne's, Hawksmoor's church, lifts its tall white tower above the rooftops, and in the basin the narrowboats and cruisers sit dark on still water with perhaps a single cabin light burning.
It is a residential district after dark, and it feels like one: well lit on the main streets, very quiet on the side streets, and dark in places along the water where the old wharves turn their backs to the path. The sensible late walk keeps to lit streets, down Narrow Street and round the basin, rather than venturing along the unlit stretches of towpath at midnight. None of it feels threatening. It simply feels asleep.
The river sets the mood more than anything built. On a high tide at night the Thames runs close under the wharves, loud against the river walls, and the far bank is a low line of windows; on a low tide the foreshore shows, a strip of grey shingle and old timber catching whatever light there is. Either way the view from the end of a Narrow Street alley at midnight is the district at its best: wide, dark and moving, with the noise of the city somewhere far behind.
Note 05
How a late evening ends here
Most evenings in Limehouse end indoors and without ceremony, which is the natural shape for a district with so little that stays open. A last drink on Narrow Street, a slow walk back past the basin, and the door of a flat or a room closing on a very quiet street, with the district already asleep around it.
For anyone who wants more life before the evening winds down, the neighbours are close: Canary Wharf a stop east, where the estate keeps its lights on, the Isle of Dogs to the south inside the river's bend, and Wapping upstream, where the old warehouses and pubs carry on along the river in the same unhurried way.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Limehouse
Asked most often
Limehouse, asked and answered
Is anything still open on Narrow Street after eleven?
Was Limehouse Nights a true picture of the place?
What is the riverside like around midnight?
Is anything left of the old Chinatown?
One zone either way
Next along from Limehouse
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.