Artesian hours: The Langham, where Regent Street turns into Portland Place

The corner where the shopping stops

Walk north from the Circus and Regent Street bends once, around the round portico and needle spire of All Souls Church, then straightens into the broad, quiet run of Portland Place. The Langham holds that corner, facing the curved stone front of BBC Broadcasting House. Behind you are the department stores; ahead, the terraces run up to Nash's Park Crescent and the gates of Regent's Park. In ten steps the street stops selling things and starts living in them.

The hotel opened in 1865, built on a scale London had not yet seen for a hotel, and it still bills itself as Europe's first grand hotel. Its best story belongs to a summer evening in 1889, when an American magazine editor put Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde at the same dinner table and went home with a commission from each. The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray followed. The rooms have been refitted many times since, but the proportions of that first era survive: tall ceilings, long corridors, a lobby with room to breathe.

Artesian: reserve the table, then plan the arrival

Artesian is the reason plenty of guests pick The Langham before they have looked at a single bedroom. Through the 2010s the bar gathered a shelf of international awards, and it still launches each new menu with the ceremony of a fashion house unveiling a collection. The room is high and glamorous, lit low enough to flatter everyone in it and busy enough that nobody studies who arrives with whom.

Reserving is the safer habit, above all on Fridays and through December. That matters more than it sounds. A companion who walks into a full bar and finds you hovering by the door starts a smaller evening than one who is shown to a table where you already sit with the menu open. Let Clementine know the time on the booking and she schedules the arrival five minutes later.

Meeting in the bar is the most natural opening this hotel offers. Grand hotels are built for people meeting in public rooms, and a woman crossing the lobby at eight to join a guest at a corner table is the least remarkable sight in the building. On a one hour hotel visit the drink can fill the whole hour, or only its first quarter before the conversation moves to your room.

Two more doors: Palm Court and The Wigmore

Palm Court is the hotel's afternoon room, and The Langham claims, in its own telling of its history, to have helped make afternoon tea a London habit in Victorian times. Accept the claim or not, tea there is the gentlest start a longer booking can have: sandwiches, scones and small cakes at a low table, finished by five, with the whole evening still ahead. It suits a first meeting better than most bars, because nobody has ever felt awkward holding a scone.

The Wigmore, on the corner with a street door of its own, is the other register entirely: a tavern with serious cooking, dark wood, brass and a proper pint if you want one. Go there when the evening should feel ordinary in the best sense, a hearty supper without ceremony before a concert or after a day of meetings. Between tea, the bar and the tavern, The Langham can host a complete evening without either of you stepping out into the rain.

Each rung of the ladder, fitted to the building

Every length on the rates ladder has a natural shape at this address. Here is how each one tends to sit.

Two cultural addresses within a short walk

A few minutes' walk south, the Regent Street Cinema deserves its place on the itinerary. The Lumière brothers showed moving pictures to a paying British audience in that building in 1896, and the restored auditorium now mixes classic revivals with new releases. Wigmore Hall, a short walk west, ranks among the world's great rooms for chamber music and song, small enough that the back row still feels close.

Either one turns a three-hour booking into a real evening out. Book the seats yourself, share the start time, and she meets you at the hotel with enough margin for a glass first. For a restaurant outside the hotel, the kitchens of Marylebone village begin two streets west, and the dinner date page explains how the four hours are usually arranged around the table.

Through the front door, and on to the lifts

Grand hotels expect visitors. The doormen open the door for everyone, the lobby is large, and the staff are trained to notice who needs help rather than who is meeting whom. A companion arriving at The Langham comes in exactly as any guest's guest does: through the main entrance, then straight to the bar or straight to the lifts, with your room number already in her messages. If your key operates the lift, collect her from the lobby yourself; the whole thing takes a couple of minutes and looks like exactly what it is, one person collecting another.

We have no arrangement with The Langham and never imply one. It appears in these notes because guests stay there and because it is among the strongest evening addresses around Oxford Circus and Great Portland Street. For the one check we run before anyone sets off, the booking page sets it out: the name on the reservation and the room, confirmed once, in writing.

From the Selection, for the top of Regent Street

Jasmin treats Artesian as research. She wants the newest menu before anyone else has ordered from it, and she will choose your drink with more certainty than you chose your own. Karolina knows the Nash buildings along this stretch by heart, All Souls first among them, and steers an early evening towards a recital before the bar. Samanta rates hotel lobbies as a hobby and will give this one a mark out of ten, with reasons, before the first glass is empty.

Karolina and Samanta both belong to the statuesque edit, and Karolina's long black hair also places her among our raven-haired companions. Jasmin sits in the petite window. Tell Clementine where you are staying, when the evening should begin and how long it should run; inside fifteen minutes she returns a companion's name, the total and her expected arrival.