Samanta, companion in Bow

About Samanta

Samanta grew fond of Bow slowly, which is how most people get there. Slim, 174 cm. Dark brown hair, long. Brown eyes. For somebody that tall she carries herself lightly: no shoulders up, no apology in the stride. She favours long lines and dark colours, a coat that reaches the calf, flat boots for the pavements out here, which are wide, cracked and honest.

Late twenties, fluent English, and easier company than her height suggests to strangers. Samanta is unhurried and a little wry, and she has no interest in impressing anybody in the first ten minutes. She likes markets, Roman Road on a Saturday in particular, she reads on trains, and she will happily spend an entire evening on one good subject rather than skating across six.

The Coborn on Coborn Road is her local answer: a corner pub with a dining room, five minutes from Bow Road station, full of people who live within half a mile of it. After that there is the canal, or a ten minute car up to the Stratford hotels, which is where most of the rooms out here actually are. She is based in Mayfair and is direct about the run east, thirty five minutes by road and well worth a longer booking.

Bow is E3 at its most residential, three minutes from Bow Road and four from the DLR at Bow Church. See rates for what an evening costs. Message booking with a postcode and Nell will say whether Bow or Stratford is the easier meeting.

Booking her

Nell takes the address, the hour and the length and confirms in writing with the arrival time. Out here two hours is the sensible minimum, and Stratford is often the easier meeting point of the two.

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

An evening with Samanta

Bow gives you a pub, a park and very little pretence, and Samanta builds an evening from exactly those pieces. A drink in a room where somebody is doing the quiz, dinner at the good end of the same building, and a long conversation that does not need a change of scene to keep going.

If the night is dry she walks you up to Victoria Park, fifteen minutes north, where the gates are shut but the streets around it are the prettiest in E3. If it is not, there is a car to Stratford in ten minutes and a hotel bar that stays open. She is entirely unbothered by either plan. What she will not do is pretend a Tuesday in Bow is something it is not, and that honesty is the whole appeal of booking her out here.