Introduction
More so than specific, scenario ‘experiences’, including the Honeymoon Experience (HME) or the Girlfriend Experience (GFE escort), on which I’ve written elsewhere, the search term that most often brings a potential client to me is ‘British escorts in London’.
It’s a somewhat elusive term, and, on one level, it’s strange even to think of London British Escorts. But being a British Escort in London, I’ve noticed, has a social cache the world over, from the cultural capitals of Europe, to the big metropolises of America, to the far-flung beaches of French Polynesia, and beyond. Even in the quieter prefectures of Japan, already steeped in their own, inimitable traditions of geisha, British Escorts in London continue to command respect, reverence, admiration, and awe.
For the discerning gentleman, British Escorts in London operate as a shorthand for the women who are discreet, intelligent, beautiful, and poised; who are up-front, direct, and authentic; who knows their own mind, knows their own boundaries, and have no hang-ups. But where did this idea of the British Escort in London come from, and just how true is it?
Choosing a British Escort in London Is About More Than Pragmatism
Unlike demeaning and puerile terms like ‘Greek’ or ‘Russian’ that are often spotted in the back of grubby, sleazy classifieds, the phrase British Escort in London refers to an actual nationality, and an actual city.
Pragmatically, it’s an easy choice if you’re a native English speaker: a shared English language helps ensure good communication, minimising potential misunderstandings that may lead to difficulties or embarrassments later. And yet, as meaningful a consideration as it is, the thrall of booking a British Escort in London goes way beyond mere pragmatism.
The London British Escort is a figure steeped in history, entwined in nationhood, and embedded into the very cultural psyche of Britain herself.
The English Rose
The librettist, Edward German, knew exactly what he was doing when, in his Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired Merrie England (1902), he first gave expression to the idea of the ‘English Rose’ as the pinnacle of beauty and femininity. In the opera, Sir Walter Raleigh compliments the young May Queen: ‘I doubt not you are fair and sweet as you are sweetly fair – a very English rose. There is no sweeter flower in all Cupid’s garden’.
For centuries, ever since Henry VII brought together the warring Houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose) under a single, unified ‘Tudor Rose’, the Rose has stood as a proud symbol of English nationhood, still seen today, on some twenty pence coins.
During the Renaissance itself, in which Edward’s opera is set, roses actually went largely ungendered, and were often even masculine. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, a disgraced Don Juan, defeated in war by his brother, Don Pedro, tells the audience, conspiratorially, that he would: ‘rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his Grace’. In the most famous speech in Romeo and Juliet, it’s Juliet who suggests that it’s Romeo who’s like a rose.
Several hundred years of cultural evolution would alter this. In the nineteenth century, women increasingly came to be regarded as ‘angels in the house’, both primary repositories and motherly protectors of Britain’s virtues. In due course, it’d be women, not men, who’d come to be symbolically paired with roses. In many ways, the modern figure of the British escort in London can be seen as a contemporary expression of this same archetype — elegant, poised, and culturally coded with layers of meaning.
The Soul of the Rose
John William Waterhouse’s ‘The Soul of the Rose’ marks a significant change. The painting depicts a beautiful, elegant woman (very quiet; very demure) tending to and enjoying the stately, pink roses in her Arts and Crafts-inspired garden sanctuary. The painting is truly an exercise in restraint. There’s nothing overtly sexual in how Waterhouse poses his model: her long red hair, that’d be loose and suggestively flowing in any other Pre-Raphaelite painting, is tied up in a neat bun; her gown remains firmly on her shoulders. Look closer, though, and there’s a delicious sensuality, simmering just below the surface. The woman leans into the wall as she would a strong lover, her delicate, unblemished neck exposed and yielding, as if to receive a tender kiss from the viewer; her eyes are closed as she draws in the delicate scent of a rose, its soft petals brushing against her nose and expectant, parted lips; her long, tapered fingers barely touch the stem of the rose or the thorny branches that could so easily hurt her. Her complexion is significant too, a toned-down take on earlier, Regency fashions: pale, white skin paired with a suggestive triangle of blush over the cheek and cheekbone, extending to the temples, like a dewy, rosy Marie Antoinette.
British Escorts in London: Daughters of the English Rose
By Merrie England in 1902, everything was in place for Edward’s ‘English Rose’: the proud symbolism of nationhood; a demure, naturalistic elegance and femininity that betrayed a yearning sensuality; and a courtly, peaches-and-cream complexion, to boot, borrowed from the eighteenth century. The archetypal English Rose is not, of course, the modern British Escort in London but, as we will see, they are sisters, with shared DNA.
At the same time Merrie England was first being performed, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1902) shocked the stage, even when performed behind closed doors to a private, coterie audience. Police shut down the latter, New York premiere.
For centuries, religious conservatism had stifled representations of British escorts who’d jostled alongside the English Rose even as she crystallised into an idea. Daniel Defoe’s zesty Moll Flanders (played by a young Alex Kingston in a still-amazing television adaptation) and ever-feisty Nancy from Oliver Twist, who eventually comes good with her heart of gold, stand out as defiant challenges to that socially restrictive order.
Mrs Warren’s Profession brings things a step closer towards a modern reality: upon graduating from university, quintessential English Rose, Vivie, learns that her mother has been working as what we might now call a British Escort in London; and the play explores the evolving relationship between the two.
In all three texts, it’s specifically London – sprawling, wondrous, and fundamentally chaotic – that gives licence to the British Escort, and allows her story to be hinted at, if not fully told. In popular culture, British Escorts are and have always been a function of the capital: there are no British Escorts without London; British Escorts are British Escorts in London.
British Escorts in London During the 20th Century
Shaw’s play ends with Vivie being forever estranged from her escort mother, the reticence about permanently fusing the English Rose and the British Escort in London finally proving insurmountable for the play, and the same would be true for much of the twentieth-century.
A more candid representation of escorts, namely The World of Suzie Wong (1960), would reimagine the escort to an exotic, oriental fantasy, which, unfortunately, persists to this day, in sad and worrying adverts for exploited Thai girls. Screen siren Deborah Kerr, meanwhile, arguably the first and greatest of cinema’s English Roses, would be confined to more wholesome, romantic, family-friendly roles when she struck out east, such as in The King and I (1956).
It was only as recent as the 1980s that popular representation of the British Escort in London could be broached in anything approaching a sustained way. The insatiable public curiosity about larger-than-life celebrity British Escort, Cynthia Payne, no doubt paved the way for Tony Garnett’s unwittingly naive debut documentary (1980) on British Escorts in London; and eventually, via Pretty Woman (1990) across the Atlantic, for Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007-11) in which Billie Piper dramatises the life of real-life blogger and high class British escort “Belle de Jour”, a name itself inspired by the 1967 French escort movie, starring Catherine Devenue).
None of these more depictions are at all complete; even the much-celebrated “Belle de Jour”, in all fairness, may only have scratched the surface of what it means to be a British Escort in London during brief time in the role.
British Escorts in London Are Not One Type
British Escorts in London draw, then, on the proud, national archetype of the English Rose but remain, in the shadows, partially represented, only in glimpses, in books restrained by religious prudery; by flawed and apologetic characters in plays; and fanciful, incomplete or sensationalist documentaries and accounts. To be fair, it’s probably how British Escorts in London prefer it: when discretion is paramount, it’s simply easier that people who don’t need to know, don’t know.
One thing worth sharing, though, is the glorious diversity seen in today’s British Escorts in London. From their partial representation in books, stage, and screen, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a British Escort in London is invariably white, middle-class, and speaks with an RP accent, rather like a broadcast newsreader. Such, historically, have been the biases of popular culture. In real life, nothing could be further from the truth.
English roses, each one of them may be, but like roses, British Escorts in London are not a homogenous group. Rather, luxury British escorts are dizzyingly infinite in their variety, as is fitting, particularly for a global epicentre of trade that London is. Should you look for a British Escort in London today, you’ll find representation from every corner of the world, from across a wide spectrum of social, regional, and ethnic backgrounds, collectively bringing a myriad of experiences and cultures to bear on the mutual project of manifesting an intimate, shared space for desire, longing, and communion.
British Escorts in London continue to elude definition, in the way that it’s always done, and it’s most likely even harder, now, to come to any fixed and stable definition. That’s no bad thing: it’s not a term that needs pinning down too rigorously. And, for those of you who’ve come searching for a British Escort in London, you may simply already know.