The City After Six

The Square Mile has about half a million people in it on a Tuesday afternoon and almost nobody in it on a Tuesday night. That emptiness is either the worst thing about the City or the most useful, depending entirely on what time you arrive.

The curve

It runs like this. Bars fill from five and are three deep by six. By half past seven the after work crowd has thinned considerably. By nine the streets are quiet and by eleven they are genuinely empty.

Everybody who complains about the City turns up at six. Everybody who likes it turns up at half past eight, when the same bar has tables, the staff have recovered, and you have the place more or less to yourself. Our post on hotel bars worth arriving early for makes the same point about timing.

What is actually here

More than there used to be. The City spent decades shutting at seven and has spent the last ten years learning not to, so there is now a reasonable run of hotels, a handful of good restaurants and some genuinely fine bars in old banking halls.

What there is not is anywhere to walk to afterwards. The City is not a district you drift through; each place is its own destination and the streets between them are dark and empty. Plan the evening as a sequence rather than a wander.

Liverpool Street, and the rest

The eastern edge is the busy one, because Liverpool Street and Shoreditch bleed into each other. Anything within ten minutes of the station stays awake later and feels more like the rest of London.

West of that, around Bank and St Paul’s, it is quieter and grander. Those old banking halls are extraordinary rooms and almost nobody is in them on a weeknight.

The weekend problem

Worth knowing before you plan anything. The City on a Saturday is close to shut. Not quiet, shut: restaurants closed, bars closed, and a genuinely strange atmosphere of empty streets between very large buildings.

Hotel rates collapse accordingly, which is the compensation. If you want a good room in central London cheaply on a Saturday, this is where it is, on the understanding that you will be getting a cab west for dinner.

Where the bookings happen

Almost entirely outcall, and almost entirely into hotels. There are very few incall flats in the Square Mile because hardly anybody lives there, which is the same reason it empties at night.

In practice most City evenings are arranged one of two ways. Either an outcall to the hotel you are already in, which is the simplest version of this there is, or you head west for the evening proper. Marylebone is twenty minutes on the Circle line and a different city. See incall or outcall.

If you are here on business

The most common reason anybody reads this. A few practical things.

• Book the outcall to your own hotel. No travel at either end, no lobby you have not seen before, nothing to arrange. See hotel bookings.
• Give a day’s notice if you can. Fewer escorts cover the City than the west, so same day here is thinner than same day in Bayswater.
• Pay cash. Particularly if the card in your pocket belongs to your employer. See how to pay.
• Eat before eight thirty. Kitchens here close earlier than you expect on a weeknight.

The short version

Arrive after half past eight and the City is one of the calmest places in London to have a drink. Arrive at six and it is one of the worst. Everything else follows from that.

Browse the roster, or ring +44 20 7846 3480.