North Reads, what the evening desk knows about the hills and the streets below them

North London is a string of villages on high ground with three great railway stations at its feet. Hampstead and Highgate face each other across the heath, Muswell Hill sits further up on its own ridge, and below them the land falls away through Kentish Town and Camden Town, where the canal runs, to the long spine of Upper Street in Islington and the termini along the Euston Road. An evening up here turns on small pieces of knowledge: which gate on the heath has a street lamp, which station empties first after a gig, which end of the street is still cooking at ten, how long the climb really takes by car at seven on a Friday.

North Reads is where the desk writes that knowledge down. The first ten begin with the evenings guests ask about most: the hour at Camden Lock after the market shutters come down, a play at the Almeida with a table timed around it, a night at the Forum on Highgate Road, Parliament Hill as the city switches its lights on, and the few heath entrances worth naming as a meeting point. Then the practical ones: where to sleep when neither Highgate nor Muswell Hill has a hotel, what to send before a first evening at home in a converted house, the hour after a conference at the Royal College of Physicians, the change at Tottenham Hale on the way in from Stansted, and a proper meal on Drummond Street before a train from Euston.

The pubs, theatres, hotels and kitchens named in these pages are there because they are worth knowing, and for no other reason. Nobody has bought a mention and the desk has no understanding with any of them. Places change faster than pages do, so if a detail matters to your evening, confirm it before you leave home.

At the foot of each piece Verity names the women who know that part of the map best, and says what length of evening it tends to want, anywhere on the rates ladder from an hour at £250 to an overnight at £1,800. Your companion is given her fee by hand when she arrives; it buys her time and her company and nothing beyond them. Everyone on either side of an evening here is eighteen or over.