Piccadilly, W1J: from a table at The Ritz to a nightcap at The Athenaeum

The Society's square started life on this road. Berkeley House stood on Piccadilly in the 1660s with its gardens running north towards open fields, and when the house burned and Devonshire House rose in its place, the upper gardens became Berkeley Square. Devonshire House came down in 1924. Its gates did not: they stand across the road today, opening onto Green Park, and most people walk through them without a thought for what they used to guard.

With the mansions gone, the road became a parade of institutions instead. The Ritz has stood at the Green Park end since 1906, one of the first large buildings in London raised on a steel frame and dressed in the manner of a Paris hotel. The Royal Academy keeps its courtyard further east, and beyond it the road narrows into the lights of the Circus. Those who dine here are mostly visitors staying close by, in town for a sale, a board meeting or a week of theatre, and they want the old London that Piccadilly still performs very well.

The Ritz Restaurant, gilded and mirrored, still expects a jacket and tie, and the Rivoli Bar beside it, Art Deco and hardly larger than a railway dining car, is where most dinners there begin. Next door, across Arlington Street, The Wolseley serves from breakfast until late beneath a high black and gold ceiling, the most forgiving table on the road when a dinner has to come together at short notice.

Towards the Hyde Park Corner end, Hide is the modern choice: two dining rooms joined by an oak staircase that curls between the floors, and a wine list drawn from the stock of its sister shop on Davies Street, which Luna treats as a second home. Further east, beyond the Royal Academy, the road offers tea rooms and old shopping arcades for an early start, and at its far end the restaurants of the Circus and Regent Street for a later one.

No hotel on or near Piccadilly has any arrangement with the Society. The five below are mentioned simply because visitors book rooms in them, and your companion enters each one as your guest, nothing more.

The Ritz, W1J 9BR, is the obvious one, and the right choice for a guest who wants the whole ceremony without leaving the building. The Athenaeum, W1J 7BJ, further west, looks out over Green Park and suits a longer, quieter stay; its bar is a natural place for the last glass. Two smaller doors wait a minute's walk north of the traffic: The May Fair Hotel, tucked into Stratton Street, and Flemings Mayfair, in a quiet run of houses on Half Moon Street, neither of them within earshot of a bus. At the western tip, beside the Hyde Park Corner roundabout, the InterContinental London Park Lane is the easiest of all for a late arrival by car.

Piccadilly lends its name to an Underground line and has three stations along its length. At the eastern end, Piccadilly Circus, where the Bakerloo crosses, is two minutes away. Green Park, the stop where Victoria, Jubilee and Piccadilly trains meet, sits some four minutes from the middle of the road. Hyde Park Corner lies about eight minutes west, right beside the InterContinental.

Your companion comes by car. On an ordinary evening a hotel on or near Piccadilly sees her within the hour of Cressida's reply, frequently sooner, because the Mayfair companions live a few streets north. Book dinner in the afternoon and she is there exactly when you asked. Cressida needs one detail, the reservation name with its room number, and asks for it only once. Her fee is yours to give her, in person, at the moment you meet, and her car, from wherever she sets out in Zones 1 and 2, is paid by the Society.

Suppose an October Friday and a guest staying at The Athenaeum, with the dinner date booked: four hours, £1,800. Violetta, the tallest woman in most rooms she enters, meets him at seven, not in the lobby but in a bookshop with a bar a short walk east, where she has already chosen the volume she intends to read him a paragraph from.

At eight they walk west to The Ritz, where the restaurant's mirrors do what they have done for more than a century and the waiters move as if on rails. She orders quickly and talks slowly. At half past ten they cross back towards Green Park in the cool air, past the old gates, and finish with a whisky in The Athenaeum's bar. She leaves before midnight; the buses are still running along Piccadilly, and nobody on any of them looks up.

No companion lives on Piccadilly, but Mayfair begins one turning north, which makes Samanta, Luna and Angelika the quickest to arrive. Lea, from Belgravia, likes a drink in an artist's dining room on Conduit Street before a late curtain. Margo prefers the white galleries of St James's, just across the road. Patricia comes in from Belgravia and Sonya from Knightsbridge, and Violetta keeps a favourite shelf on the road itself.

Every turning north off Piccadilly leads into Mayfair. Berkeley Street climbs to the square that gives the Society its name in about five minutes. Beyond it lies the wider Mayfair district, with Claridge's and The Connaught. At the western end, where the traffic swings round Hyde Park Corner, the hotels of Park Lane begin.