Let's get this after-party started

Granted, it was attended by the great and the good from all sectors of society, including Anya Hindmarch, Samantha Cameron, Dominic West and Alice Rothschild, and guests drank Louis Roederer champagne and feasted on caviar and truffle-oil crostini.

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But of equal - or some might argue greater - significance was whose names had been included on the guest-list for the after-party party, held at Willa's on Swallow Street.

For in London now the view is that a party isn't a party without a Plan B. Far from being the messy part of the evening for a wired crowd incapable of going to sleep, the after-party - or APP - is where the fun really starts.

Last week I hosted my first poetry book launch and top of my to-do list when organising it was to find a venue for when Sketch sent us vodka-fuelled poets on our merry way. In the end, anyone still going strong moved downstairs to the Parlour (though we weren't taking tea).

"The party," says writer Richard Dennen, who organised Tatler's late-night revels, "was appropriately pretty grown-up. I thought that at about 11.30 when the older crowd wanted to go back to Eaton Square, the younger crowd probably wouldn't be ready for bed."

He came to an arrangement with the staple of after-party venues: the not-yet-open nightclub.

Willa's - a kind of Annabel's for twentysomethings run by socialite Willa Keswick - agreed to do a private party.

Hugely popular after-party venue 17 Berkeley Street also fits this bill - although it's not strictly new as it has been open for a few nights a week for months hosting late-night private parties.

With a long, skinny bar, it is intimate and dark with loads of sofas to crash on - the perfect design for bad behaviour.

Witness Rhys Ifans cosying up to Lily Allen at a party Omega threw there for the face of its brand, Cindy Crawford. Even squeaky-clean-living Cindy stayed up late and drank champagne.

Dark and exciting décor explains part of the enduring appeal of the subterranean Wellington in Knightsbridge as an after-party venue.

Damien Hirst even donated a glittering diamanté skull-shaped disco ball.

In general the art world has always been expert at after-parties: from brawls at the Colony Club to Miami Art Basel, where going to bed at three is considered borderline dull.

Dick Diver, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, takes a rather perverse view of the ideal after-party: "I want to give a really bad party I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette."

Our protagonist deliberately invites difficult guests to spice things up a bit but in reality, unless you are a sucker for punishment, getting the guest list right for your secret venue/hotel suite party is half the battle.

But if the wrong crowd turns up and the atmosphere is dying, there is always an escape route; the after-after-party. Veteran party thrower and jeweller Stephen Webster explains how to pull it off.

"At an agreed time, feign tiredness - after all, you've already been to the party and the after-party."

Then make your exit and, as Stephen says, there's the delicious satisfaction of the not-so-cool crowd commenting: "What's up with you? Thought you were supposed to be a party animal."

Stephen Webster's A-PP rules

The after-party is always better than the main event.

Basements are the best venues. The feeling has to be "lock in".

Drinks: beer and spirits (Jack Daniel's, whisky, vodka). No champagne.

After-parties never have VIP areas. If there is one, the person giving the after-party doesn't really want to be there.

The reason for the proper party is to make an appearance at some point. (The worst after-party I have ever been to was between Madonna and U2. Neither turned up.)

A-PP invites require skill. Spread the word among the crowd required at the after-party. This is either done by prior arrangement or by passing out wristbands incognito.

This is high risk and needs someone with nerves of steel to carry it out. My wife is an expert.

Weak-stomached drunks are least likely to be invited. A true party animal is not an animal at all but just someone with tolerance levels that are inhuman. This is essential.

People who are not used to such excesses will be embarrassing and generally annoying.

Possibly to the point of throwing up in public. This will sour the after-party and is to be avoided at all costs.