Nancy, companion in St Pancras

About Nancy

Golden blonde, worn long, and blue eyes that hold a room without trying: Nancy has been described from across a lobby more often than she would like. Curvy and 170 cm, she dresses with a grown up restraint, one good dress and no argument, the sort of thing that reads well under the Barlow shed's iron and equally well in a quiet restaurant. At thirty she is unhurried in a way that younger women spend years trying to imitate, and she is entirely uninterested in being anybody's idea of an entrance.

She is calm, curious and unusually good at a conversation that starts somewhere small and finishes somewhere unexpected. One language, English, used with a soft precision, asking follow up questions rather than moving on. Books are the honest answer to what she does with her time, and she is unembarrassed about spending an afternoon in a reading room and an evening talking about what was in it. She is a natural companion for a traveller arriving off a long train with nothing left to say about work.

Her St Pancras evening often starts at the British Library on Euston Road, six minutes along from the station, where the Treasures gallery is free and holds more history per square metre than anywhere else on this road. She comes up from Covent Garden, three stops on the Piccadilly line and under ten minutes, which means she is never the reason an evening starts late. Afterwards the hotels here are the best part of the district, and she is happy to finish the evening on the same street she began it.

The hotels worth asking for are named on the St Pancras page. Send an arrival time through to the evening desk and Nancy will be waiting somewhere quieter than the concourse, having walked there rather than run; a fortnight away simply means the diary after it is uncrowded.

Asking for her

Nancy suits arrivals and long evenings equally, and she will hold a start time if a train is running behind. The dinner date at £900 is her usual booking; ninety minutes at £400 works for a stopover.

Every figure she works to is already public on the board, and the order of the evening is set out on the booking page.

An evening with Nancy

Six o'clock, the light going amber on the brickwork, and Nancy suggests an hour in the Treasures gallery before anything else. It costs nothing, it is four minutes from your bag, and it is the only room in London where you can stand in front of a notebook that changed the world and then go straight to dinner.

By eight she has a table somewhere with white cloths and a waiter who does not rush. She asks about where you have come from and where you are going next, and she means both questions. Later, if you have not seen it, she will take you up to the upper level of the station just to look down the length of the shed, which she still thinks is the most beautiful ceiling in the city.