Southwark escorts, SE1. Bankside, between the Tate and the Globe.

Tate Modern's chimney is the landmark everyone here gives directions by. The building was Bankside Power Station until 1981 and opened as a gallery in 2000, and its upper floors look across the river to the dome of St Paul's. The Globe, reconstructed in 1997 a short walk from the original, still plays by daylight under an open roof through the summer season.

Inland, the district is quieter than its riverfront suggests. Southwark Street and Union Street carry offices and converted warehouses, Flat Iron Square gathers bars and food stalls under the railway arches, and Blackfriars Road runs south to Southwark station through a line of new towers. After the galleries close, the riverside path here is one of the best evening walks in London: lit, level and rarely crowded after nine.

Between the Globe and Borough, Clink Street runs in shadow beneath tall warehouses, past the rose window of Winchester Palace, all that is left of a medieval bishop's London house. The prison that stood beside it gave the language its slang word for a cell. It is a strange, handsome little street, and it leads straight to the market.

Hilton London Bankside is the largest, a modern hotel on Great Suffolk Street with its own bar and restaurant. citizenM London Bankside is two streets away on Lavington Street, with compact rooms and a lounge that feels like a shared living room. The Hoxton, Southwark is on Blackfriars Road, with Seabird, its restaurant, on the fourteenth floor. Sea Containers London sits on the river just west of Blackfriars Bridge, and Shangri-La The Shard is about ten minutes east by cab.

Each is simply somewhere a companion may be asked to go, and none of them has any tie to us. Private homes in the warehouse blocks between Southwark Street and the river are welcome too, on the same terms and at the same rates.

On a night when the gallery opens late, a guest books the four-hour dinner date at £900. They meet at the river entrance of Tate Modern at seven and spend an hour among the collection, trading opinions about which rooms deserve the trip. Then a table with St Paul's lit across the water, and afterwards the Thames Path west towards the hotel, twenty minutes at an easy pace. The last part of the evening is private, and it ends precisely when the booking does.