Windsor escorts in SL4, from the High Street hotels down to the river

Visitors own it by day, residents get it back by nine

By six the coaches have gone and the High Street changes character completely. The castle wall is lit, the pavements clear, and the whole place starts behaving like the small town it is underneath. Anybody who has only seen Windsor at two in the afternoon has not really seen it at all.

The practical thing to grasp is that the kitchens here close earlier than the atmosphere implies. A table before eight is easy, a table at half past nine is an act of faith, and after ten your options narrow to hotel bars. Build the evening the right way round and Windsor is one of the best nights available in the Thames Valley.

Five hotels in SL4, four of them minutes apart

Each of these appears here because guests stay in it. This desk has no arrangement with any hotel in Windsor, tells none of them anything, and never involves a front desk in a booking.

SL4 1LJ, an old coaching inn, and SL4 1LH beside it both stand on the High Street within sight of the castle wall. SL4 1PQ is on the same street towards the Guildhall end. A fourth sits a little below them on Thames Street, closer to the bridge and the water. All four are inside a four minute walk of one another.

The Victorian house at Water Oakley, SL4 5UR, is the outlier: a house in grounds beside the river, about ten minutes west by car, and a completely different evening from the other four. If that is where you are staying, treat it as a country booking rather than a town one and give the journey its due.

Two stations and a six minute shuttle

Windsor and Eton Central is three minutes on foot from the High Street hotels and runs the shuttle up to Slough in six minutes, where it meets the Elizabeth line and the fast trains to Paddington. Windsor and Eton Riverside is six minutes away at the lower end of town and runs the South Western line to Waterloo, a little under the hour. Datchet, one stop up that line, is about thirty minutes if you walk it.

So a companion has two ways in, and most of them take the Slough shuttle because it is faster. The shuttle thins out around half past eleven, which means an evening meant to run late is better booked long than watched on a departure board. By road the M4 at junction 6 is ten minutes, Maidenhead twenty and Heathrow around twenty five.

What a Windsor evening usually looks like

Dinner early, then the town. The walk down Thames Street towards the bridge takes six minutes and is worth doing in any weather, and the view of the castle from the middle of the bridge is the best free thing in Berkshire. Theatre Royal Windsor on Thames Street keeps a proper programme and stands ninety seconds from three of the hotels, which makes a show an easy frame for the night rather than a production in itself.

Two hours covers a table and a drink. Three is better if there is a river walk in it. Four, the dinner date at £900, is what people book when a curtain is involved, because Windsor curtains fall late and the kitchens have long since shut. Her fee is handed over in person when she arrives, and it is the figure Etta confirmed in writing.

The four who work Windsor

Bianka is the easiest company on a High Street that closes early and knows the walking times by heart. Luna builds her evenings around the Theatre Royal and will tell you honestly when there is nothing worth seeing that week. Cindy takes the riverside tables on the Promenade and drives out along the M4 herself. Violetta is tall, slender and much prefers a long evening to a short one.

From next door, Jasmin and Lucy are six minutes away over the bridge in Eton, while Michelle and Rosa come one stop down the line from Datchet. Two or three more travel south from Slough in a quarter of an hour when a weeknight suits them.

Ten minutes out of SL4

Eton is across the bridge, six minutes on foot, one narrow street with better tables than its size suggests. Datchet is one stop on the Riverside line, the same river with a tenth of the people beside it. Slough is the shuttle and the fast trains, and the reason anyone arrives here from London quickly. Maidenhead is twenty minutes west for the Thames without a castle attached.