Angelika, companion in Shoreditch

About Angelika

Angelika comes up the stairs of the Tea Building two minutes early, and the punctuality tells you more about her than any list of adjectives would. She is 172 cm and built like someone who trains: athletic shoulders, a long stride, no fuss in how she moves. Her black hair is long and dead straight, down past the shoulder blades. Brown eyes that read a room in one pass and then stay on you. She dresses dark and plain, good boots, a coat that has been rained on before, nothing that asks for attention on a street full of people trying.

The dryness is real. Angelika is in her mid twenties, speaks English fluently and says less than most people expect, then lands one line that resets the table. She likes buildings, specifically the way a warehouse becomes flats and nobody stops to ask whether it should. Get her onto the Boundary Estate and you will lose ten unhurried minutes to brickwork. She is not performing warmth, so when it turns up it counts for something.

Her Shoreditch is small and exact. Dinner at Lyle's on Shoreditch High Street, where the room is bare and the menu runs to four lines, then the walk up Redchurch Street with the shutters coming down around you. She is based over in Mayfair and is honest about the trip: forty minutes by road at eight, half that by eleven, and she would rather sit in the bar early than have you watching the door.

Shoreditch is nine minutes on foot from Liverpool Street, so she reaches most of the Shoreditch rooms without touching the traffic at all. The figures are public on rates. One line through booking puts the evening in Nell's hands.

Booking her

One message to the desk with a time and a postcode is enough, and Nell confirms in writing before Angelika leaves. You settle with Angelika herself, in person, when she arrives at the door.

Every figure she works to is public on the board, and the steps sit on the booking page.

An evening with Angelika

Eight o'clock, a bar on Rivington Street with the door propped open and the music low enough to talk across. Angelika takes the stool rather than the sofa and asks what you actually do, not what the job title says. Dinner after that is two streets away and short: four courses, no ceremony, the kitchen in full view of the tables. She eats properly and tells you so. Then there is usually a walk, because Shoreditch at half past ten is worth twenty minutes of anyone's evening, the vans loading on Sclater Street, a queue at a door with no sign on it. If it is raining she drops the walk without comment and you are back in the warm early. None of it is stage managed. That is rather the point of her.