Laura, companion in Whitechapel

About Laura

Whitechapel Road never really empties, and Laura counts that in its favour. She is 169 cm and athletic, shoulders from swimming rather than a gym, with long light brown hair that holds a sun kissed streak and green eyes that go pale under the market lights. She dresses for movement: a fitted dress she can cross a road in, a coat with pockets, boots chosen for the state of the pavement outside the station.

Mid twenties, English fluent and quick, and a habit of finishing other people's sentences and then apologising for it. Laura is curious in a practical way, less interested in what you think than in how you ended up thinking it. She swims at the York Hall pool most weeks and can describe the smell of it with unnecessary accuracy. She eats like someone who has been swimming.

Which brings you to Tayyabs on Fieldgate Street, where she is entirely at home: the noise, the queue, the grills coming past your elbow. She will order too much and be right about it. Afterwards the walk back up to the station takes six minutes and the Elizabeth line puts you back at Liverpool Street in two, which is the part visitors never believe. She lives near Paddington and calls it twelve minutes on one train.

Whitechapel sits on four lines at once, so she is rarely far away from wherever you are sleeping. The rates page answers the money question. One message through booking is enough: Nell works from a time and an address.

Booking her

One message to the desk with the hotel and the hour is enough, and Nell confirms with her arrival time. Laura is quick to reach from any Elizabeth line stop, so a late request is always worth putting to the desk.

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

An evening with Laura

An evening with Laura has no lull in it. She arrives already talking, hands you the good news about the table she has found, and is out of her coat before you have finished standing up. Food first, always, because she is honest about being hungry and finds the two drink preamble a waste of a night.

After dinner she likes the stretch of Whitechapel Road between the station and the old bell foundry, which is ugly and busy and completely alive at eleven at night. She points out the fruit stalls closing and the hospital windows still lit. If you are staying over towards Aldgate she will walk it rather than take a car, nine minutes, and talk the whole way. Back in the room she goes quiet quite suddenly, and that switch is one of the better things about her.