Every area we drive, listed in full

Each of the 606 pages opens with what the place is like to drive rather than what it is like to visit. Which road governs access at eight in the morning, where a long saloon can legally stand, which entrance at the local hotel is the one used for loading, and how far it really is to the airport that area uses.

Underneath that sit the practical numbers: indicative door-to-terminal drives, road distances, the postcode districts covered, and the stations we collect from when rail is doing the middle of the journey. None of it is a guarantee, and none of it is padded out with figures nobody checked.

• The roads, stations and landmarks a chauffeur navigates by
• Indicative drives and distances to the airports that area uses
• Where the car can wait, and what to do when it cannot
• Four questions answered for that place alone

Ten of the twenty-one groups are inside Greater London, which reflects the work rather than any preference. A car in Mayfair and a car in Aberdeen are the same booking with different roads under it, and the standard of welcome does not change because the postcode does.

Outside London the pattern shifts. Journeys get longer, the airport is often regional rather than one of the five London gates, and the reason for booking is more likely to be a two-hundred-mile run than a twenty-minute one. The pages reflect that, which is why the Cornwall entries do not read like the Clerkenwell ones.

The list is the set of places with a written page, not the set of places we drive to. A collection from a village between two of these entries is an ordinary booking; it just gets priced against the nearest named area rather than one of its own.

Long-distance work makes this obvious. A run from London to a house in the Borders passes through nothing on this list for two hours at a time, and the quotation covers the whole journey rather than the parts of it we have written about.

Almost every area page carries at least two airports, nearest first, with an indicative drive and a road distance. That is the single most useful number on the page, because it is the one people work backwards from when they are deciding what time to be ready.

The meet works the same way everywhere. The chauffeur parks, walks into the arrivals hall, and stands at the barrier with a name board. Flights are tracked from the tail number, so a two-hour hold changes our arrival time rather than your booking, and the waiting is part of the transfer.

The written quotations do not change by postcode. An hourly booking in Harrogate is priced from the same card as one in Knightsbridge, and the difference between two transfers is the distance and the time of day rather than the address on the front of the quotation.

As-directed hire is booked in a block of hours with the car held for you between stops; airport transfers are quoted per journey. No standing price list is published anywhere on this site, and the written quotation is what fixes the price.

Send the date, the pick-up address, where you are going and how many people and cases are travelling. If it is an airport run, add the flight number and the airline, because the airline decides the terminal and the terminal decides where the car stops.

A written quotation comes back naming the vehicle, the collection time we would recommend and what the figure covers. Nothing is metered, nothing is multiplied for a Friday, and if the journey changes we requote in writing rather than adjusting an invoice afterwards.