Whitton escorts in TW2, a high street with a station at the end of it

The high street, in full

It takes about seven minutes to walk the whole of it. There is a proper butcher, a bakery, a handful of small restaurants with tables close together, and the kind of pub that has one television and turns it off when the room asks. Nothing on it will appear in a list of the best places in London and nothing on it needs to. On a Tuesday evening you will be one table among locals, which some guests find more relaxing than any amount of white linen.

Whitton station sits at the top end, three minutes from the shops, with South Western Railway trains that reach Waterloo in about thirty five minutes. The last one back into town leaves a little after midnight, which makes it a soft deadline rather than a hard one, because a car from here takes about forty minutes at night.

A shot tower in the trees

Crane Park Island is ten minutes from the station on foot: a nature reserve built on an old gunpowder works with the River Crane splitting either side of it, and an eighteenth century shot tower standing in the trees where the works used to be. There are kingfishers if you are quiet and patient, and a heron that treats the place as its own.

It is the first place to take anybody who claims there is nothing out here, and it takes twenty minutes. Go before the light goes, because the paths are unlit and the island is genuinely dark once the sun is off it. Afterwards it is a short walk back to the High Street for dinner, or ten minutes by car down into Twickenham if you want a wider choice.

The fixture list decides the week

Twickenham stadium is twenty minutes from Whitton station on foot and a good deal less by road, and on an international day more than eighty thousand people arrive in a town built for a fraction of that. Trains become a scrum, every table is booked out weeks ahead, no taxi comes within two miles and nobody hears a word anybody says. It is a wonderful day out and a hopeless evening.

Check the calendar first. Two of the companions on this page do it as a matter of habit before agreeing a date, and Iris will look it up for you if you would rather not. On a week with nothing on, TW2 is one of the easiest evenings on this site: dinner, a walk, and a street where nothing is happening to anybody.

Where the rooms are, and where they are not

Whitton has no hotel of its own. The nearest is on Chertsey Road at TW2 6LS, ten minutes on foot from the station and roughly the same from the ground, which makes it either the most convenient address in the area or the worst, depending entirely on the fixture. Further in, the Whitton Road hotel at TW2 7BA is the newest and much the smartest, and the one on London Road at TW1 3QS is the plain option.

None of those has any tie to us. Most bookings in TW2 are at private addresses anyway, because the postcode is almost entirely houses and the houses are almost entirely quiet.

The two anchored here

Jasmin found the shot tower in her first week and has been taking people to it ever since. She likes a six o'clock start while the reserve is still light, then dinner on the High Street, and she talks at speed for the first hour and settles considerably after it. Stacy is deadpan enough that people spend half an hour working out whether she is joking, and she checks the rugby calendar before agreeing to anything.

From next door, Lea and Rosa come up from the Twickenham river, and Thea across from Feltham. All twenty eight portraits are in On The Route.

Where TW2 leads

Twickenham itself is twenty minutes on foot or five by car, with the river, Church Street and a great deal more to eat. Hounslow Central is twenty two minutes north and has the cinema and the late food. Feltham sits west across the Crane valley, flat and quiet. And Isleworth is a short drive north east if you want the Thames rather than the Crane.