W1K · W1J · by introduction
A Mayfair street is older than its postcode by the better part of three centuries. The squares were laid out under the first Georges; W1K and W1J date from June 2000, when Royal Mail recoded W1 and withdrew the district's old letters, W1X and W1Y.
Read as a sorting office reads it, the belt comes apart by the letter: K to the north, J to the south, and a seam between them that no street sign admits to. Octavia introduces W1K and W1J escorts to a hotel room or a private door on either side of it, and the companions she has met are in the introductions.
The addresses here are landmarks, not partners, and we give the postcode rather than the name. She can meet you in the bar downstairs or at your door, whichever you prefer, and the room is confirmed once in the chat.
05 // lobbies by postcode
Underground · walking minutes
Based in or near W1K and W1J, each of them travels to hotels and residences here. Open a file for her portraits and rates.
The W is the oldest part. Sir Rowland Hill cut London into lettered postal districts in 1857 and 1858, and this was the Western one. The figure followed in 1917, when each district was divided into numbered pieces and the piece nearest the centre of town took the 1.
W1K lies, near enough, over the Grosvenor family's Mayfair ground: about a hundred acres south of Oxford Street and east of Park Lane, written in the early deeds as The Hundred Acres. It takes in Grosvenor Square, Mount Street below it, and Park Lane for most of its length.
W1J is what Mayfair keeps to the south: Berkeley Square, the streets falling away from it to the south and west, and then Piccadilly. It does not stop at the kerb. From the corner of Green Park to the Circus the far pavement writes J as well, though the streets behind it are SW1. The third Mayfair letter, S, went to the eastern strip: Bond Street, Dover Street and Albemarle Street, which gives this house its name.
The seam runs just south of Mount Street, which writes K; Farm Street, one street down, writes J. Further east, Grosvenor Street is K and Bruton Street is J. Nothing on the wall says so. Westminster's nameplates, drawn by Misha Black's Design Research Unit in 1967, give the street in black and the district in red, and the district they give is plain W1.
Farm Street also keeps the telephone exchange that once answered as MAYfair, GROsvenor and HYDe Park, in the years when a London number began with three letters.
Nothing, in this house. Escorts in W1K and W1J are arranged alike on either side of the seam: from Octavia's written confirmation to the door is about an hour, longer at the rush; the fee, from £600 for the hour, covers the companion's journey anywhere within the two central fare zones, and beyond the second zone the taxi there and back is priced and written beside the fee as one total, as the rates set out.
The Underground map knows neither letter: it offers Green Park station, a walk of 4 minutes, then Bond Street at 5 and Hyde Park Corner at 7, and leaves the rest to the envelope, while the district entire is described on the Mayfair page.
Brief answers, kept on file. Octavia answers anything further in writing.
Ask OctaviaFor most of the district it began W1X or W1Y. Both were withdrawn in June 2000, which is why an address book from the nineties no longer agrees with the envelope.
Because the nameplates date from 1967, more than thirty years before the extra letter existed. The K or the J is left to the envelope.
J, from the corner of Green Park to the Circus, like the side facing it. Turn off towards St James's and the addresses become SW1.
Because 629 is MAY on a lettered dial. Until all-figure numbers arrived, from 1966, a caller dialled the first three letters of the exchange, and Mayfair's still stands on Farm Street.
Streets either side of W1K and W1J have pages of their own: escorts in Mayfair, Berkeley Square hotels, Park Lane, escorts in Grosvenor Square and Piccadilly hotels. The same companions travel to each.
Name the hotel or the street near W1K and W1J. Octavia replies with who is free and the minute she will arrive.