How long to book, postcode by postcode, from SL4 to the Terminal 5 belt

Distance decides the length

In central London the length of a booking is a question of how much evening you want. Out here it is also a question of geography. The SL postcodes spread from Maidenhead in the west to the edge of Heathrow in the east, and the places inside them are separated by motorway junctions, river crossings and stretches of open country. Where dinner is a walk, a short booking works. Where dinner is a drive, the drive sits inside your hours, and a length that would be generous in Windsor feels hurried in Langley.

Her own journey out never changes the figure. It is counted inside the fee on every rung of the ladder, from £250 for an hour to £1,800 for an overnight, and no postcode carries a travel charge. What changes from place to place is how much of the evening you will spend getting to the table and back, and that is what this guide is really about.

SL4: Windsor and Eton, where two hours is plenty

Windsor is the easiest postcode on the desk. Its hotels stand within a few minutes' walk of one another, Windsor and Eton Central is three minutes from the High Street, and everything an evening needs is on foot: the tables, the old pubs, the bridge, the theatre on Thames Street. An hour at £250 is realistic in a Windsor hotel in a way it is not almost anywhere else out here, because none of it goes on travel.

Two hours at £500 covers a drink and a table without hurry, and it is the length most Windsor guests settle on. Three is better if a river walk is part of the plan or the dinner is at one of the busier riverside rooms. Over the bridge, Eton works the same way. There is one hotel on the Eton side and a handful of tables on one street, the whole evening can be walked, and two hours is enough there too.

SL1: Slough in two, Burnham in three or four

Central Slough sits between the two extremes. The town centre hotels are close to the station and a few minutes from junction 6, and two hours is the standard booking: a drink downstairs and dinner in the hotel or a short ride away. Add an hour if the table is in Windsor, which is fifteen minutes each way by car and turns a two hour evening into a rushed one.

Burnham shares the SL1 postcode and very little else with the town. It is a village with ancient woodland to the north and country houses set back in their own grounds, where nothing is walkable except the gravel and the trees. An hour here is mostly a drive. Three hours at £700 is the honest minimum for anything involving a table, and the four hour dinner date at £900 is what most Burnham guests end up booking, because that is the length a country dining room wants.

SL3: Langley, Datchet and the Terminal 5 belt

Langley is built around junction 5 of the M4 rather than a high street, and its hotels sit on or near the junction. An hour in the hotel is perfectly possible, and some guests want exactly that. The moment a table comes into it, though, dinner means a drive to Windsor, Datchet or Slough, and three hours at £700 is the length that stops the evening feeling like a series of car journeys.

The same postcode covers Colnbrook and Poyle, where the hotels along the Old Bath Road and Poyle Road exist for Terminal 5. That stretch has a firm rule rather than a recommendation: everything on the airport edge runs to three hours as a minimum at £700. It is not a surcharge, simply the length that leaves a real evening once the journey to and from the perimeter is accounted for.

Datchet, the riverside village south of Langley, sits in between. Two hours works for a guest staying in the village itself. Three is better from a hotel outside it, since there are no hotels in Datchet and the evening starts with a drive.

SL6: Maidenhead, Bray and the grand houses

Maidenhead has a station, a river and a good deal more to eat than the towns to the east, but its tables are spread out and its kitchens close early. Three hours at £700 is the length most evenings there need. Bray, ten minutes out of town, and Cliveden, up the hill at Taplow, are four hour dinners by nature, and the guide to dinner in Bray explains why the famous rooms there sometimes want even longer.

Beyond the postcodes this desk writes pages for, the same logic holds. Stoke Poges and Farnham Common in SL2, Iver in SL0, Ascot in SL5 and Marlow in SL7 can all be arranged. Count the drive to dinner and back, add it to the evening you actually want, and the right rung usually becomes obvious. Etta will say so if she thinks a booking is too short for where it is.

A quick key to the right rung

Every figure below comes from the same ladder that applies to every companion on this desk. Whichever rung you choose, she receives the fee in person at the start of the evening, the same figure Etta confirmed in writing, and nothing is added afterwards.

Companions who know the distances

Liana is precise about what is actually walkable from a Langley hotel and will take you round the avenues of Langley Park before dinner if there is light left. Laura is the other Langley regular, at home on the Heathrow side of Slough and happiest with an evening that starts early. Bianka knows the Windsor walking times by heart and is the easiest company on a High Street that closes early. Vanessa is practised at the hours before a dawn departure from the Terminal 5 end of the Bath Road.

All four are on the brunettes list, which covers every shade from sandy to almost black, and Vanessa and Liana are also among the slender. The hotel call out page sets out how any of these lengths is arranged.