Rosa, companion in Whitechapel

About Rosa

Rosa arrives on the Elizabeth line with her coat over one arm and about four minutes to spare, because she has been somewhere first and will tell you where. Curvy, 160 cm, chestnut brown hair long and tightly curled, brown eyes that widen when she is interested, which covers most of her waking hours. She dresses in colour on a street full of grey, and she is the shortest person in this book by a couple of centimetres.

Mid twenties, fluent English, spoken in a rush when she is enthusiastic and slowly when she is not. Rosa is genuinely curious rather than politely curious, and she follows a subject wherever it goes. She draws badly, paints slightly better, and has spent more hours in free galleries than most people spend in paid ones. She is the easiest company in this book for anyone who dislikes silence.

The Whitechapel Gallery on Whitechapel High Street is where she starts if the timing works: two floors, no entry charge on the main shows and a bar at the front that stays open past the last room closing. Dinner is five minutes east or nine minutes west into Aldgate. She lives in Marylebone and gets here in twenty minutes flat on one train, which she mentions every single time. The bar at the front is the cheapest good drink in E1 and she will happily say so out loud.

Whitechapel sits on the District, the Hammersmith and City, the Elizabeth line and the Overground at once. Look at rates for the figures, then one line to booking with an hour on it is all Nell needs.

Booking her

Give Nell the hour and the address and she will send back a written confirmation with an arrival time. If you want the gallery before dinner, book for six, because the main rooms shut well before the bar does.

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

An evening with Rosa

An hour in the gallery is the best possible start with her, because she talks about what is on the wall instead of about herself, and you learn more that way than any amount of polite questioning would give you. She has favourites and she is not embarrassed about the obvious ones.

Dinner afterwards is usually east along the main road, somewhere bright and busy where the food arrives fast. Rosa eats enthusiastically and talks with her mouth respectably closed. Later there is the walk back past the station with the hospital lit up behind you and the road still moving at eleven at night. She is small enough to tuck under an arm in the wind and will do exactly that without asking.