Escorts in St James's, SW1A and SW1Y: who is close, and how soon
Every foreign ambassador posted to London is still accredited to the Court of St James's, although St James's Palace stopped being the monarch's main London home in 1837, when Queen Victoria moved to Buckingham Palace. St James's grew as the ground beside a royal house, filled with people who wanted to be near the court, and a surprising amount of what they put up is still standing between Piccadilly and the park. St James's escorts work here in a district that still feels older and quieter than the streets a few hundred yards north.
For escorts in St James's, the plain answer to who is close: nobody on the board gives SW1A or SW1Y as home, and the nearest three live over the road in Mayfair, north of Piccadilly, so the office works to its ordinary central figure here, roughly an hour from its confirmation, stretched when the evening traffic sets in, with her exact time written into the chat and every length listed on the rates. Below, the quarter is read layer by layer, oldest first.
On the ground
St James's in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameSW1A 1NJ, SW1A 1NY, SW1Y 6JF, SW1Y 4AN, W1J 9BR.
Nearest stations
Walking timeGreen Park, 3 minutes. Piccadilly Circus, 5 minutes. St James's Park, 6 minutes.
Getting there
SW1A, SW1YTravel 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 St James's
Who works here
On the board in St James's
The eight prints above are a first shortlist for St James's tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
A leper hospital, then a Tudor palace
In the Middle Ages a hospital for leprous women stood in the open fields west of Charing Cross, dedicated to St James the Less. Henry VIII acquired it in the 1530s, cleared it and built a palace on the site, and the piece of his work a visitor meets today is the red brick gatehouse, with its octagonal corner towers and its clock, closing the bottom of St James's Street.
The palace remains a working royal building and its state rooms are not open, so the gatehouse is admired from the pavement. Behind it lies the Chapel Royal. Across Marlborough Road stands the Queen's Chapel, designed by Inigo Jones in the 1620s and finished for Henrietta Maria, the Catholic queen of Charles I, and usually counted among the first churches in England built in the classical manner. It is a plain pedimented box that looks a century younger than it is.
Note 03
Henry Jermyn's plan and Wren's parish church
After the Restoration, Charles II granted the fields north of the palace to Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans. From the 1660s Jermyn laid out a grid of streets around a central square for aristocrats who wanted a short walk to court, one of the first planned residential quarters in London. Most of his houses have since been rebuilt, but the street plan has barely moved, so walking it is still walking his drawing.
A new quarter needed a parish, and Jermyn gave the work to Christopher Wren. St James's Church on Piccadilly was consecrated in 1684: brick outside, galleried and light within, with a marble font and a limewood reredos carved by Grinling Gibbons. William Blake was baptised at that font in 1757. Bombing in 1940 left the church badly damaged and it was restored after the war; its forecourt still opens onto Piccadilly as a quiet way through to the streets behind.
Note 04
Chocolate houses that turned into clubs
The court brought politics, gossip and gambling, and all three needed rooms. In the late seventeenth century they found them in the coffee and chocolate houses opening along St James's Street. White's started as a chocolate house in 1693 and is now the oldest gentlemen's club in London, its bow window still facing the street where members once sat to be seen. Boodle's and Brooks's followed in the eighteenth century, on the same street.
In the nineteenth century the new clubs went up on Pall Mall, and grander. Charles Barry built the Travellers Club there in the early 1830s and the Reform Club next door in 1841, both modelled on Italian palazzi, and Jules Verne set Phileas Fogg's wager in the Reform before sending him round the world. All of them remain private, and nothing is on show beyond the facades. They are free to look at on any evening.
Note 05
Shops that never moved, and a court off the street
Some of the oldest shops in London are here because their customers never left. A wine merchant has traded from No. 3 St James's Street since 1698, and the big scales on which it once weighed its customers, Lord Byron among them, belong to the shop's story as much as the cellars do. A few doors up the street, a hatter has been in business since the seventeenth century.
Next to the wine merchant, a narrow timber-lined passage opens into Pickering Place, a paved Georgian court often called the smallest square in London. Tradition makes it the scene of the last duel fought in the city, and a plaque on the wall records something firmer: the Republic of Texas kept its legation here in the 1840s, while Texas was still an independent country.
Note 06
Great houses on the park edge
The last layer is the row of great houses along the park. Marlborough House was built to Wren's design for Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and finished in 1711; the Commonwealth Secretariat occupies it now. Clarence House went up in the 1820s to designs by John Nash for the future William IV and stands against the palace itself. Spencer House, built in the 1750s and 1760s for the first Earl Spencer, faces west across Green Park, a rare survivor among the private palaces of London.
An evening among these buildings can take its tone from them: a quiet table, a walk past lit facades, a door that closes without fuss. Tell the office which of those you have in mind and she dresses for it. If the night drifts south, Westminster begins on the far side of the park.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for St James's
Asked most often
St James's, asked and answered
Why are ambassadors still accredited to the Court of St James's?
What is the oldest building still standing in St James's?
Was a duel really fought in Pickering Place?
Did the gentlemen's clubs begin as private clubs?
Who designed the church on the Piccadilly side of the quarter?
Can the Tudor rooms of the palace be visited?
One zone either way
Next along from St James's
escorts in Piccadilly Circus
W1J, W1DSame ladder, same honest hour, one zone further across the map.
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.