London W8

Tantric Massage in Kensington

Earl's Court, Sloane Square and Bayswater are all minutes from W8, so most guests barely need the Tube. Morning is the busy time locally, which makes it the easy time for us.

Nearest stations: High Street Kensington, Gloucester Road, Notting Hill Gate
Our room: Nearest: Baker Street W1, Bayswater W2
Outcall: Same rate with most therapists
Hours: Every day, 10:00 — 23:00

Museum stone gone quiet, plane trees overhead, the sound of one taxi three streets away.

The reverse of every postcode east of us: requests for tantric massage in Kensington name 11:00 or 14:00 more often than any evening hour. Suits everyone. Late morning is our quietest stretch, and a two-hour session at that time runs without a clock in the room.

Evenings in W8 are stately and short. Museum crowds thin by six, the shops shut not long after, and the squares settle into the sort of quiet that thick curtains and old money buy. One taxi three streets away, and you hear it. Which may be why Kensington does not book evenings: the district considers the day finished by eight, and its residents take the Earl's Court SW5 room in daylight instead.

The journey barely deserves the word. Rooms in Earl's Court and Sloane Square sit a stop or two from High Street Kensington, and Bayswater is a short hop round the Circle line. Which one you head for depends on the therapist, since each works from her own district, and the door itself comes with the confirmation.

One W8 regular has held the same Wednesday 11:00 for over a year and calls it, drily, her committee meeting. Two hours. No agenda, no minutes. We stopped asking what the committee decides, and the therapist involved guards the slot with a ferocity we find professionally admirable.

Outcalls go to the hotel row on Kensington's southern edge and the serviced flats nearby, priced the same as the room with most of our therapists, and the wide-roomed terraces give a table all the space it could want. The smaller conversions towards Earl's Court SW5, where we keep a room of our own, are the ones to mention in the form.

Wednesday at eleven, two hours, nobody else about as far as I could tell. I plan the week round it now.

Landmarks nearby: Kensington Gardens, the museums, Holland Park.

The address of whichever room you are booked into is given when the booking is confirmed, not before. Every entrance is shared with other businesses and none of them carry signage.

When Kensington books

11:00 and 14:00 on weekdays, the opposite of every postcode east of us.
Wednesday is the strongest day, for reasons W8 has not explained.
Evenings and weekends from Kensington are scarce.

What you can book from Kensington

01 Tantric massage Nobody unclenches on command. You can walk in off the Northern line absolutely knackered, lie down on a warm table with every intention of relaxing, and your shoulders will still be up round your ears twenty minutes later. That is not you being bad at this. That is just how bodies work, and it is why the length of the session matters more than anything else on this page. From £250 02 Nuru massage The gel goes into the warmer about an hour before you are due, and a session gets through the best part of a litre of it. Most of what is written about nuru in London leans mystical. The truth is bodywork plus logistics — warm gel, warm mat, a lot of laundry — and the logistics are half the craft. From £350 03 Body to body massage “So she massages me with… all of her?” A guest put it exactly that way last spring, sounding half curious and half alarmed, and it remains the shortest honest description we have — her whole body doing work that hands alone cannot, warm oil in between, and rather less mystery to it than the name suggests. From £250 04 Four hands massage Here is the arithmetic most men get wrong before they book this. They expect double pressure — twice the hands, twice the force. The pressure is ordinary. What doubles is the information: two therapists, two tempos, until the part of your brain whose whole job is predicting the next touch throws its hands up and goes quiet. That part of the brain, it turns out, was most of the noise. From £350 05 Lingam massage Every couple of weeks someone asks to book twenty minutes of lingam work on its own — skip the rest, straight to the word on the page. We decline every time, and not out of preciousness. In the tantric tradition this is not a technique you lift out of a session; it is a stage the rest of the session exists to reach. Here it lives inside a full ninety minutes or more, and the placement is the practice. From £250 06 Yoni massage A surprising share of these enquiries open with an apology. Sorry if this is an odd request, sorry if you do not really do this, sorry to bother you. It is not odd, we do, and you are not. This is quietly one of our most booked sessions — mostly women in their thirties and up — and the apologies stop at the door. From £250

Questions from Kensington

Do you have a room in Kensington?

Not in Kensington itself. Our rooms sit in Baker Street W1, Bayswater W2, Edgware Road W2, Earl's Court SW5, Sloane Square SW3, Paddington W2 and Barbican EC2, and a therapist can also come to you in Kensington.

What does an outcall to Kensington cost?

With most of our therapists, the same as a session in her own room — no supplement. The outer zones and the late hours are agreed case by case before anything is confirmed, and nothing is discussed once the therapist is in the room.

How late can I book in Kensington?

The last session of the day starts at 22:00. For later outcalls further out we sometimes say no, and it is about how the therapist gets home rather than the address itself.