Escorts in Chelsea: a floor plan from the King's Road to the Embankment

Chelsea had what is generally counted the first important porcelain factory in England. In the 1740s Nicholas Sprimont, a silversmith from Liège, helped to found and then ran a works that settled at the north end of Lawrence Street, and for some forty years it made soft-paste porcelain for the luxury trade: plates painted with botanical specimens, miniature scent bottles, tureens modelled as rabbits and as bundles of asparagus. Collectors date a piece by the mark underneath, an incised triangle first, then a raised anchor, a red anchor and finally a gold one.

In 1770 the works were bought by William Duesbury of Derby, who ran the two factories together until 1784, then shut Chelsea down and took the moulds north. Nothing of the building survives. A plaque on Lawrence Street records that Chelsea china was made there from 1745 to 1784, and that the novelist Tobias Smollett lived in part of the same house.

Very little of it stayed in SW3. The Victoria and Albert Museum, at South Kensington, shows Chelsea porcelain among its English ceramics, and the British Museum has its own. For a house that writes each companion up as an exhibit label, from a desk in the museum quarter, the arrangement is a pleasing one: the district's first export is on display in the next room of the floor plan.

Tite Street ends at the Embankment, and in the 1880s it filled with painters' studios. Oscar Wilde lived at number 34 from the mid 1880s until his trials in 1895, in rooms decorated for him by the architect E. W. Godwin, who also built several of the studio houses further along. The door has a blue plaque.

Across the street, John Singer Sargent painted his sitters at number 31 until he died there in 1925. Written as labels the two would read: number 34, playwright, about ten years; number 31, portrait painter, to the end.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti took 16 Cheyne Walk in 1862 and stocked its garden with animals: owls, armadillos, kangaroos, peacocks and, in 1869, a wombat he doted on and drew. The wombat survived barely two months. The peacocks were so loud that leases on the estate are said to have forbidden them ever afterwards.

A plaque on the house names Rossetti and the poet Swinburne, who lodged with him. In the gardens opposite, between the house and the river, a memorial fountain of 1887 carries a bronze portrait of Rossetti by his friend Ford Madox Brown.

The King's Road is usually described by its shop windows, yet a short row near the corner of Oakley Street has nothing for sale. Argyll House, number 211, was built in 1723 to a design by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni, and it is still a private house.

Two doors along, at 215, a plaque records that the actress Ellen Terry lived there from 1904 to 1920. Down Oakley Street itself, at number 42, another records the months Bob Marley spent in the house in 1977.

Where the King's Road bends at World's End, number 430 has been Vivienne Westwood's shop since 1971, when she and Malcolm McLaren took it over. It changed its name with nearly every collection, and under one of those names, in the mid 1970s, the Sex Pistols were assembled from its customers and its staff. Since about 1980 the front has carried a large clock with thirteen hours on its face and hands that spin the wrong way.

The shop still trades, and some of what was first sold over its counter has since been shown under glass: the V&A gave Westwood a full retrospective in 2004. Chelsea's exports have a habit of ending up in SW7.

Chelsea Football Club has never played a home match in Chelsea. Its ground, Stamford Bridge, opened in 1877 as an athletics track and stands just over the boundary in the neighbouring borough; the club was founded in 1905 to give the stadium a team, and took the district's name without ever moving in. On match days the crowds come and go through Fulham Broadway.

Sloane Square station is a 5 minute walk, South Kensington 10 and Fulham Broadway 12.

Chelsea has few hotels and a great many private front doors, and a house or a flat is visited on the same footing as a hotel room. That holds for escorts in Chelsea as it does anywhere: Eleanor checks the building and the flat number where she would otherwise check a room. If dinner is the plan, the four hour booking is the one this house wrote for it, aperitif to last drink.

Count on about an hour between Eleanor's confirmation and the doorbell, more on evenings when the traffic through SW3 has stopped moving; one hour is from £250 and, with SW3 inside Zones 1 and 2, her journey is already in that figure, while for an address beyond Zone 2 the desk adds the taxi fare there and back before you confirm, as the rates page prints in full.

East, the King's Road runs out at Sloane Square. To the north west lies Earls Court. The postcode as a whole is drawn on the SW3 plan.