'Enough tips to buy my own home'

It was St Trinian's night at Stringfellows last night. They know what your British chap likes. A constant succession of beautiful girls in tiny white shirts and even tinier little gym skirts, sliding up and down poles, twirling ties, sucking on lollipops. One of the girls on a giant video screen had two children tucked up at home but blokes don't come to places like this to think about what's at home, theirs or anyone else's. They come here to escape and the job of girls at Stringfellows is to create a problem-free pleasure zone for them to escape into.

Fleur Isabella has been at Stringfellows for more than three years. She's a headturning girl in her late twenties with a wild head of highlighted corkscrew curls, long legs and a very confident manner. When she was a little girl in ballet class in Kingston she never dreamed that she'd be hanging from a pole in the West End for a living, nor did her mother, but she's given up her night off to come in and tell me how much she loves it.

Fleur was the sort of well cared for little girl whose mother took her to ballet classes from the age of three, dreaming of tutus and point shoes. Growing up in middle-class Kingston, she was attracted to the arts as a career, with an A-level in History of Art and plans of training as a graphic designer. But she was a strong-minded teenager and she was clashing with her new stepfather and wanted her independence fast. To move out of home, she needed to earn her own living, not to be an impoverished student.

She got herself a job in marketing with a firm selling steel rope to the construction industry, but a girl that good-looking wasn't going to stay in the backroom. She spotted an ad which said, "Are you glamorous? Want to earn a lot of money?" Yes, thought the young Fleur, and became a croupier.

"You have to be personable," she says, "fairly intelligent, be able to add up very quickly." And it was a steady job. Then her best friend persuaded her to audition as a table dancer at Stringfellows.

The attraction of the job is that it gives a girl financial independence. As well as the pleasure of looking glamorous and the boost to selfesteem from being found attractive every night, there's the pleasure of taking home up to £1,000 a week, of buying your own home, as Fleur has, and renting it out, as she does.

When she first started, her mother was not happy. She wanted more for her. "She thought I was far too intelligent to be working in a club, but men don't like stupid women. Lots of the guys who come in here have got daughters of 18.

"It may be nice to have some 18-year-old being all breathy and excitable around you for five minutes, but then it's boring. They actually like having intelligent conversation, which can be anything from being outrageously flirty, fun stuff, to wanting to know about you."

Pleasure is shopping and vegging out sometimes at home, without having to make conversation with anyone and not having to be glamorous - even though having your body on display means going to the gym regularly, staying off drink and drugs and sensible eating. Healthy stuff. It's also having a boyfriend who's relaxed about what you do - that's not true for all the girls.

Fleur wouldn't recommend the job to young girls. "It can be very destructive. You see a side of the male psyche you don't always want to see. Some men can be really rude. If they've had a bad day they'll take it out on you."

And what would she say if her own daughter came and said she was going to work as a lap dancer? Fleur hesitates. "If I had a daughter I suppose I'd feel like my own mother did for me. I'd want more for her than this. "