Twickenham escorts, TW1: Church Street, the ferry steps and the tide

The lane down to the water

Church Street runs off the town square and is about as close as this side of the river gets to a village evening: small restaurants, tables near enough to hear the next conversation, and a couple of pubs that have been on the same corners for centuries. At the bottom, Riverside runs along the water past the ferry steps, where a boat has crossed to Ham for four hundred years and still does on demand.

The White Swan sits on Riverside with a garden between it and the Thames, and on a big tide the water covers the road, the causeway to Eel Pie Island disappears, and anybody who wants to leave either walks a plank or orders another drink. Locals check the tide table. Newcomers take photographs. Both are correct.

Two houses worth an hour before dinner

Orleans House Gallery is an octagon room of 1720 standing in woodland by the river, five minutes along from Marble Hill, free to walk into and attached to a house that no longer exists. It is extravagantly plastered for one surviving room, and it is quiet almost all the time.

Strawberry Hill House is the other one: Horace Walpole's small white castle on Waldegrave Road, all battlements and stained glass and rooms coloured like the inside of a jewellery box, five minutes from Strawberry Hill station. It is the building that started the gothic revival and it is a good deal smaller than anybody expects. It does not open every day, which catches people out, so it is worth checking before the afternoon is planned around it.

Three stations, and one weekend problem

Twickenham station is three minutes from the square and about half an hour from Waterloo. St Margarets is twelve minutes away and closer to the river path towards Isleworth. Strawberry Hill is eighteen minutes south and is the stop for Walpole's house.

On an international match day all three become impassable. More than eighty thousand people arrive, every table in town has been booked for weeks, the trains run full and standing, and the evening you were imagining is not available at any price. Several of the companions on this page decline those dates outright and offer the day after instead, which is genuinely the better evening.

Where to stay in TW1

The hotel on Whitton Road at TW2 7BA is the newest and sits by the ground, which makes it excellent on a quiet week and unbearable on a loud one. The one on London Road at TW1 3QS is plain, central and five minutes from the square. On Cross Deep at TW1 4RB stands the one actually on the river, small and old and named for the poet who built a villa nearby. The Chertsey Road hotel at TW2 6LS sits out towards Whitton.

None of them is connected to us. They are here because guests stay in them. Houses along the river and the streets behind Church Street make up a good share of the bookings in TW1 as well.

Three companions on this stretch of river

Lea will take you to the octagon at Orleans House while the light lasts and then walk back into town for dinner on Church Street, and she refuses match Saturdays without apology. Rosa times an afternoon against the tide table, books the table upstairs at the White Swan and is delighted when the causeway floods. Tiffany does Strawberry Hill and the river walk back, and she is exacting about detail and never about people; she returns on the fourth of October.

Stacy and Jasmin come down from Whitton, twenty minutes up the road. Every portrait is in On The Route, and the figures are all on the rates page.

Just beyond TW1

Whitton is twenty minutes north with a plain high street and no crowds. The village at Isleworth is the same river a little downstream, quieter and older. Brentford is twenty minutes by road with a canal and a lock. And Hounslow Central is the nearest place with a cinema and late food, which on a Sunday night matters more than it sounds.