The Diary: stage door notes on the streets this house works

Every theatre keeps a book at the stage door: who is in the building, who is due, what time the half is called. This is ours, kept for guests rather than the cast. It covers the ground the house works every night, from the Piazza and the lanes of Covent Garden down the Strand to the river, north through Holborn and the garden squares of Bloomsbury, and up the Euston Road to the three great termini at Kings Cross, St Pancras and Euston.

The entries are practical before they are anything else. First come the grand hotels, from The Savoy to the old Midland Grand above the Eurostar platforms, taken bar by bar and room by room, with the small details that decide how an arrival feels. Then the tables: when to sit down before a 7.30 curtain, which rooms still hold a table after ten, how to find a proper dinner near the market without eating from a laminated card. Later entries follow the season, the trains, the manners of the stalls and the arithmetic of booking around a performance.

Nothing here is written to fill a page. Venues are named because they are real and worth knowing, not because anything binds them to this house; there are no partnerships behind these pages, and none are wanted. Where a detail shifts with the season, a last seating or an opening hour, the entry says so plainly and suggests you ask.

Each note links onward, to the companions who know that corner best, to the engagements an evening there tends to fall under and to the rates that apply, from £250 for a first hour. Read one before you message the desk, and the conversation that follows will be shorter, sharper and better timed.