Massage near Queensway, eight minutes from the hotels

Queensway is where Bayswater meets the park: the restaurants and the ice rink at one end, Kensington Gardens and the Italian Gardens at the other, and in between more hotels per hundred metres than almost anywhere in London — the terraces on Inverness Terrace, Queensborough Terrace and Kensington Gardens Square, the larger hotels facing Bayswater Road. The studio is a few streets east, on Leinster Gardens, a quiet residential road most guests find quicker to reach than their hotel’s own spa and a good deal calmer.

Visitors book two things above all. A slow full body massage on the first evening, so that the jet lag never quite arrives — there is a whole note on that in my notes. And deep tissue after a day on foot through the park and the museums, when the lower back and calves have had more London than they expected. Residents of the mansion flats around Queensway come for the opposite reason: the same room, the same hour, every three or four weeks, like a standing order.

The arrangement is the same for everyone. One masseuse, one room, no reception, an hour that is actually an hour. Message with a rough time and the address and door instructions come back within minutes.

Getting here from Queensway

From Queensway station (Central line), cross to the park side of Bayswater Road and walk east for three minutes to Leinster Terrace; turn up it and continue into Leinster Gardens — eight minutes in all, flat. From the hotels on Inverness Terrace, cut through Porchester Gardens; from Kensington Gardens, leave by the Black Lion or Lancaster Gate exits.