Companions for a Coliseum night in Charing Cross, WC2N

St Martin's Lane runs the length of the postcode with the Coliseum halfway along it and the Duke of York's a little further up, and the lanes off it are better than the street itself. Cecil Court is a single pedestrian passage of second hand booksellers and print dealers with gas style lamps and shopfronts nobody has been allowed to modernise. St Martin's Court crosses beside it with two dining rooms that have fed theatre audiences for a century.

Below the station the scale changes again. Buckingham Street and the streets of the old Adelphi run down towards the gardens, Georgian, narrow and almost silent by nine. At the bottom of them stands the York Watergate, a stone arch built in 1626 as a private river gate, now marooned a hundred yards inland because the Victorians pushed the Thames back to build the Embankment. It is the strangest two minutes of walking in the whole postcode.

Guests with tickets, first of all. An evening at the Coliseum finishes around half past ten, early enough for supper and late enough that nobody wants to start looking for company afterwards. Then the gallery visitors, who spend a day in the National Gallery or the Portrait Gallery at the top of the square and want a dinner with conversation in it rather than silence. And a quieter group in the serviced flats behind Northumberland Avenue, who book longer evenings and rarely at short notice.

Four hours with dinner at £900 dominates on performance nights. Away from them, an hour from £250 and two hours at £500 carry most of the week.

The Clermont Charing Cross is built over the station itself, a French chateau roofline above the Strand with the concourse directly beneath the lobby, which makes it the shortest possible walk from a train to a room in central London. The Grand at Trafalgar Square stands on Northumberland Avenue in a restored Victorian house with a roof terrace above the corner. The Royal Horseguards sits a few minutes south on Whitehall Court, its silhouette better known from the river path than from the street.

Serviced flats on Buckingham Street and Craven Street take the same bookings on the same terms; Craven Street is the one where Benjamin Franklin lived for sixteen years, and the house is still there. Every one of them is an address and nothing more; no agreement ties them to the house, and she simply arrives as your guest.

Charing Cross, one minute from most of the postcode, Bakerloo and Northern below with the Kent services above. Embankment, three minutes down Villiers Street, adding Circle and District. Leicester Square, four minutes uphill on the Northern and Piccadilly.

The whole postcode is Zone 1, so the journey sits inside the fee. The useful note for a performance night is that the Coliseum empties onto St Martin's Lane all at once, so the taxi ranks move slowly for fifteen minutes and walking down the hill is genuinely faster.

A curtain time fixes everything else, so lead with it. Send the performance and the start time, how long you would like and the address, and the desk will work backwards to the hour she should arrive. An answer comes back 10 to 15 minutes later, by day or in the middle of the night, carrying her availability, the figure and the minute she will arrive.

One exchange fixes the booking name, the house and the room number, and the subject is then closed. Standard evenings are secured the moment those details line up. A night to morning, an event, or travel is arranged the same way, only earlier, because the opera house empties at a fixed time and so do the tables around it.

Most WC2N arrivals happen inside the hour of confirmation, and rather faster from the Piazza four minutes uphill. If the opera overruns, tell the desk and the hour shifts to suit.

18:00, a first drink in the lobby bar above the station, three minutes from the theatre and entirely unhurried. 18:45, ten minutes up St Martin's Lane, with time to look into Cecil Court on the way if the shops are still lit. 19:30, curtain. 22:30, supper in St Martin's Court where the waiters have seen every opening night for decades and the kitchen is used to a late table. 00:00, down the hill with Trafalgar Square floodlit behind you.

Written as four hours with dinner, that is £900. Without the performance, three hours at £700 covers the drink and the table. Two hours at £500 suits a late arrival, ninety minutes at £400 an hour upstairs, and ten hours at £1,800 takes it past breakfast.

Karolina is the obvious choice when there is a performance in the evening: she lives four minutes uphill in Covent Garden, follows the season closely enough to have opinions on casting, and will tell you afterwards exactly why the second act worked. Samanta travels in from Mayfair, tall and composed, and carries a grand room and a long evening equally well. Margo comes over from Knightsbridge, slim and dark haired, and is good company for a guest who has spent all day being talked at.

Anyone else in the company reaches WC2N on the same figures, with the journey already inside the fee.

Four minutes up through the lanes sits Leicester Square, and Covent Garden with its Piazza lies just beyond. East along the Strand, the crescent of Strand and Aldwych begins at Wellington Street. Over the Hungerford footbridge, ten minutes on foot, Waterloo and the South Bank start on the far side. The six WC2 letters are mapped on the WC2 page.