Most people’s idea of Paddington is formed entirely by the station forecourt. A train, a bear, a taxi rank. That version is accurate for about four streets. Walk past those four streets and the postcode changes completely.
Paddington has the canal, Little Venice, a rooftop restaurant on the 17th floor of a Renzo Piano building, and streets quiet enough at night that the heels are audible on the pavement. For an evening with a woman who dresses with deliberate authority – the kind that makes a room recalibrate when she walks in – it’s a better option than most of London gives you credit for.
Paddington has a lot of entertainment to offer. Here you find the famous Paddington escorts, discrete and serious, especially when it comes to domination and master and servant dynamics.
Start high up
CÉ LA VI is on the 17th floor of 1 Paddington Square. Pan-Asian food, pisco cocktails, glass on all sides. Battersea, the Shard, Hyde Park – all visible from the table. Get there before dark.
Book a corner table. A tall blonde in a structured dress and high heels at that window, London spread out below her, has a particular kind of composure that the setting rewards. She knows exactly what the view is doing for the evening. Order the cocktails first. The pisco-based ones are worth it. Take your time – the floor above has a lounge bar with a DJ later, and there’s no reason to rush the table.
One floor up, the lounge bar runs into the late evening. Less formal, louder, the city still visible through the glass. A good place to move to after dinner without leaving the building. Stay for one drink, then go down to the canal.
The walk that makes the evening
Go down after dinner and head west along the canal. Paddington Basin is five minutes from the building – water, glass offices, narrowboats. After that, keep walking. The office blocks thin out, the towpath gets quieter, and after about fifteen minutes Browning’s Pool comes up – two canals meeting in a triangular basin, houseboats moored around it. Stop there. Little Venice is ten minutes further west.
Little Venice is ten minutes further. Blomfield Road on the north bank, narrowboats with lights on inside, Maida Avenue on the south side with Regency townhouses behind iron railings. Most of London has never walked it. A tall redhead in a BDSM-influenced outfit and high heels on the Blomfield Road towpath at 9pm, the canal dark beside her – that stretch of water gives the evening something that no restaurant can manufacture.
She’ll walk ahead at some point. Let her.
Dinner, if you want it earlier in the evening
If the evening runs dinner before the canal rather than after, Orsini is on Petersham Place just off the Bayswater Road – a small Italian restaurant that’s been feeding the neighbourhood for years. Orsini has white walls, close tables and a menu where the pasta is made that morning and the specials are worth asking about. A curvy brunette in a dark dress and high heels sits at one of those close tables. She’s Tina, the prettiest domination escort you can find in Paddington. You can go to her place or book a date with her – whatever you like.
The Frontline Club on Norfolk Place is ten minutes away from the station. It’s a private club for journalists and war correspondents, but the restaurant and bar are open to non-members most evenings. Dark wood, serious wine list, the kind of crowd that’s been somewhere difficult and has opinions about it. A mature woman in a face mask carried rather than worn, heels, a dress that signals exactly who’s in charge – the Frontline crowd is too well-travelled to react to anything. Good service, no commentary.
After the canal, somewhere to sit
The Summerhouse on Blomfield Road has a terrace on the canal. Worth checking ahead because it closes earlier than you’d want on some nights. When it’s open in summer, a table on that terrace with a late glass of wine is the right way to end an evening that started seventeen floors above the city.
If the Summerhouse is shut, the Prince Alfred on Formosa Street is five minutes away. Victorian pub, original snob screens still intact – the wooden partitions that divide the bar into separate compartments, each one closed off from the next. Most pubs lost theirs decades ago. A skinny blonde in a BDSM-influenced dress takes a compartment and the partition closes. Private in a way that open-plan bars never are.
What Paddington gives you
The evening runs from a rooftop above the station to a canal towpath in Little Venice, with dinner somewhere in between. It covers less than two miles and four completely different registers – the glass tower, the water, the Italian table, the Victorian pub compartment.
Most people’s idea of Paddington stops at the station. That’s useful. It means the canal, the rooftop, and the quiet streets west of the basin are still largely to themselves. That’s rather the point of knowing where to go.
If you’d like, you can read more about the Master&slave dynamics here.
