Escorts in Holland Park: a floor plan from the station lifts to Melbury Road

Cross Holland Park Avenue from the station and the first exhibit stands at the corner of the street called Holland Park: St Volodymyr, the ruler of Kyiv a thousand years ago, in bronze. The sculptor was Leo Mol, who was born in Ukraine and made his career in Canada, and the statue was put up in 1988 by Ukrainians living in Britain, a millennium after Volodymyr brought Christianity to his country.

The saint has neighbours. The Ukrainian Institute is at number 79 on the street behind him, and the country's embassy is at number 60.

One plaque north of the avenue is worth seeing before the route turns south. Clarendon Road leaves Holland Park Avenue on its northern side, and at number 50 a blue plaque records that Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel lived in the house. The two of them had founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 and led its campaign for the vote, and Emmeline took this address during the First World War.

A catalogue would give the house one line: campaigners, mother and daughter, W11.

The street called Holland Park is really four roads under one name: two long ones running parallel to the avenue, and a shorter one at each end joining them to it. Both long roads are lined with large detached villas put up to a single pattern by two brothers, William and Francis Radford, from 1860 into the late 1870s. Walk either one and the repetition is the pleasure of it, one pale stucco front after another. Several now house embassies.

Between the two long roads runs Holland Park Mews, with an archway of 1862 at its western end. It was built with the villas as their stabling, coach houses below and rooms for the coachmen above, and the outside staircases that reached those rooms are still in place. The cobbles are still down as well, so this is a stretch for flat shoes.

The mews is easy to miss from the avenue, and it is the reason this page is written as a walk.

South of the villas the ground belongs to the park, and until 1952 it did not belong to the public. It was the private grounds of Holland House, which had come to the Earls of Ilchester in 1874; the London County Council agreed to buy house and grounds together in 1951, and the purchase went through the following year. The route can go through the park while it is open, or follow Abbotsbury Road down its western edge when it is not.

The roads to the south and west of the park read like the index of another county. The Ilchester family's seat is Melbury, in Dorset, and Abbotsbury, on the Dorset coast, is theirs too. When their London land was laid out for building, the new roads were named from home: Melbury Road and Abbotsbury Road after the two estates, Ilchester Place after the title, and Strangways Terrace after the family surname, Fox-Strangways.

The route ends at 18 Melbury Road, a house with two blue plaques. One is for William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite who painted The Light of the World; he moved in during 1903 and died there in 1910.

The other is for Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus, whose army had beaten a British force at Isandlwana in 1879. He stayed in the house in 1882, when he came to London to ask for his kingdom back, and was restored to part of it the following year. Kensington High Street is at the foot of the road.

From the foot of Melbury Road the shops of High Street Kensington begin to the east, with Kensington beyond them, and the avenue where the route began carries on east to Notting Hill. Holland Park station is a 1 minute walk, Notting Hill Gate 7 and Shepherd's Bush 8.

The evening itself needs less describing. Give Eleanor the address, whether a villa, a mews house or a flat, and she settles the building and flat number with you before anyone sets out; for a dinner you are hosting at home, add the occasion, the dress code and the hours. Escorts in Holland Park arrive at a private door as they would at a hotel room.

Reckon on about an hour after she confirms, more when the avenue is busy; the hour starts at £250 with her travel counted in, W11 and W14 both lying inside Zones 1 and 2, and an address past Zone 2 has the taxi fare out and back added to the figure you are shown before you agree, all of which the rates page sets out.