Lea, companion in Spitalfields

About Lea

Brick Lane at dusk is a line of open doors and a smell you could navigate by, and Lea takes the turnings without checking any of them. She is petite, 161 cm, with long auburn hair that waves properly rather than curls, and hazel eyes that shift with whatever light the street is giving. She wears soft colours in a district of black coats, which is either bravery or a good eye, and she takes the cobbles in flat shoes.

Early twenties, fluent English, and warmer than the neighbourhood expects. Lea asks questions in threes and holds onto the answers, which becomes obvious the second time you meet her. She collects buildings the way other people collect photographs, in particular the eighteenth century houses off Fournier Street, and she will detour four minutes to show you a door she likes. She never has a phone out at a table, which she treats as a matter of manners rather than a rule she has been given.

Dinner is almost always St John Bread and Wine on Commercial Street, because the room is plain, the bread is the point and nobody there is in a hurry. From the table it is five minutes on foot to Liverpool Street and five the other way to Shoreditch High Street, which makes Spitalfields the easiest corner in the east to finish an evening in. She is based over in Belgravia and comes by road, half an hour at eight.

Her patch is Spitalfields, five minutes from the City hotels and a world away from them. Fares live on rates. Send the hour through booking and Nell will handle everything else.

Booking her

Give Nell the hotel and the hour and she confirms it in writing, walk time from the market included. Lea is an easy choice for a dinner date, since almost everything she likes is within six minutes of the table.

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

An evening with Lea

Meet her under the market canopy at seven, when the traders are packing up and the restaurants are filling. Lea does the short version of Spitalfields first: Fournier Street with its shutters, the old weavers' windows up in the eaves, the churchyard that goes suddenly quiet twenty steps off Commercial Street. Ten minutes, and you have seen three hundred years.

Dinner is unhurried and she talks with her hands. She is good at getting a story out of you sideways, without ever asking anything that feels like an interview. Afterwards there might be one drink on Brushfield Street or the slow walk east to Brick Lane for the noise of it. She is happy to end at nine and equally happy at two, and she is honest about which she would rather.