Cities
London after dark
London after dark, hour by hour: Mayfair, Soho, Shoreditch, King's Cross and Chelsea, how private the city really is, and where the law draws its line.
Sections
CitiesCity Index
Six scores out of 100 for every city after dark: nightlife, luxury, privacy, dating scene, late night and alternative scene, with the method published.
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GuidesGuides
What the conventions are actually protecting, what your phone quietly keeps, what a night costs, and where the law stands country by country.
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RankingsRankings
The City Index describes cities; Rankings puts them in order. Six dimensions, six tables that disagree, and the reader-voted World Class 100.
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ProfilesProfiles
Every character in this section is invented and every image is generated. No profile depicts a real person, and nobody here is available for anything.
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Encyclopedia
The reference half of the site: vocabulary with dated definitions, districts with a documented history, media history, law and where the money went.
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Latest articles
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World Class Escort
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Cities scored on what they are actually like at two in the morning. Guides to the parts nobody writes down. And a cast of characters we invented, because the alternative was writing about people who never asked to be written about.
Most city guides go quiet after dinner, which is a pity, because dinner is when a city stops auditioning. This domain has been publishing under the name World Class Escort, on and off, since 1999. What it is now is a magazine.
We write about the hours the guidebooks skip: where the night goes once the restaurants have turned the lights up, how the expensive end of nightlife actually works, what discretion costs and what it buys, and how the law, the money and the manners change between one capital and the next.
Three pieces to start with
London after dark takes one city hour by hour, and explains how a place can be watched this closely and still say this little. New York after dark is the opposite temperament, and reading the two together does more than either does alone. What a night costs answers the question everybody arrives with and nobody types out in full.
The five sections
The City Index scores cities on six dimensions and then compares them, which is the only useful way to settle whether Paris or Milan suits a particular kind of weekend. Rankings turn those scores into tables: who wins on privacy, who loses on closing time, and who is quietly better than its reputation.
The Guides cover practical ground, including etiquette, privacy, money, safety and the legal position country by country. The Encyclopedia defines the vocabulary and keeps the history, including the media history that shaped this industry more than any legislation did.
Profiles is fiction. Every character in it is invented and every image is generated. Nobody there is real, available, or based on anyone who is.
What we are not
We sell nothing. We book nothing. We take no advertising from operators, agencies or platforms, and we carry no listings.
That is arithmetic rather than modesty: a publication in this territory that starts brokering turns everything it writes into marketing, and everyone can tell. Refusing leaves us free to score a city badly and to end a guide by saying the honest thing, which is sometimes that you should save your money. The editorial standards set out how the scores are built and what we will not publish.
This site is for adults.