At 218 High Street is a very old-fashioned looking establishment which sells jewellery, new and second hand, on purple-brown velvet trays in a dark brown set of wooden-framed display windows. They also advertise a workshop where in-house design and re-modelling takes place. In this regard there are some similarities between this shop and St George's Jewellers, half way down the High Street. There is, however, a greater emphasis on the second-hand side of the business at By Design, where a whole window to the right of the entrance is devoted to Secondhand Bargains. (And very interesting it is too, because By Design have not joined Fish Brothers in disposing of pledge items on the internet, as far as I can tell). They display the newer, Nicole Barre branded diamond jewelery in the left window, along with some rings, chains, earings, watches etc.

As the Bargain window suggests, By Design differs completely from St George's in offering cash loans and pawnbroking, no doubt a service which is of use to the customers of the nearby Collins Ltd Bookmakers. In this, By Design are similarly placed in the market to their grander rivals Fish Brothers (opposite the Tote) and the rivals Capital Gold and Chain Reaction, poised for the business a short shuffle over the road from Paddy Power.

Between China Ocean Buffer Restaurant and D.P Mark, the chemists.

Conveniently close to the bus and tube stations at Walthamstow Central, At 216 High St, the China Ocean Buffer Restaurant offers an all you can eat buffet from Sunday to Thursday for £4.99* , with children's meal for youngsters under 120cm tall at £3.49* and children under five being catered for at £1.49*. (*Drinks not included).

For those who want to order à la Carte, or dine on Friday or Saturday, they can choose from a wide range of mains and starters, including mussels in sake, stuffed crab claws, squid in ginger and spring onions and curry tofu, as well as all the usual Chinese food one expects from a modern take-away in the UK: 'special fried rice', crispy aromatic duck (1/4 duck £5.90, whole duck £19.99, including pancakes, cucumber, spring onion and hoi sin sauce), sweet and sour ribs, chicken with cashew nuts, Singapore chow mein etc. China Ocean can cater for larger groups and parties and will negotiate a discount rate on a 'buy 10 get one free', basis.) As they say in their window, 'Why Cook?', when you can call (Tel)020 85206622.

China Ocean is across the alley from Sweets & Treats, and next door to By Design. The other main oriental 'buffet' restaurant on the High Street, Tropical Taste, near St James Street Station, is slightly larger, and has a wider variety of cuisines on offer.

Nest door to the Copperfield Cafe is Sweets & Treats, a shop that occupies a useful position for all the school children who pour through the Rose Villas gap from the High Street on their way to the bus station in the early afternoon. They sell a small number of daily papers, sweets, biscuits, chocolates, small cakes, drinks, milk and cigarettes.

They also have a small kiosk selling mobile phones, accessories and phone cards. On the other side of the alley is the China Ocean Buffer Restaurant.

At 212 High Street, the Copperfield has been described by one reviewer in the past as selling, 'reprehensible' coffee. This seemed a pity because at the top of the market and High Street and in close proximity to the Walthamstow Central bus and tube stations, this is a useful little spot for a discrete bit of loafing about. A good coffee break might be just what the swots in the upstairs room of the library could do with, as well.

The cafe is between Scope and Sweets & Treats, overlooking the empty piece of wasteland known in polite circles as the 'arcade site'. I make it up there to taste the coffee this afternoon. It was fine. In fact, I rather liked it- mild, milky with a slight froth on top. It reminded me of coffee before we all went to Starbucks, and then found proper coffee, like that at Cafe Azrou, Cafe Rio or even Euphoria, only with a much 'rounder' taste than the kind of cheap, powdery, bitter 'church youth club' taste that many places used to serve. Not reprehensible at all. And only 60p for a large mug.

The cafe, or snack bar, or 'cafe and snack bar', depending on which sign you look at, has wooden veneer tables, chairs that can be moved, and a fair view out the window to the 99p Store to its left and the navy blue painted fence behind which the purple flowering budleah grow on the derelict improvement to our local scene that is the 'arcade site'. Inside, the floor has grey and white chequered tiles, the walls are pale blue. For the first half from the floor up, they are covered with some rather bathroomy blue tiles. From the shoulder height of the pretty Romanian waitress, it is painted plain blue, the walls punctuated by some rather strange brass reliefs of fishermen framed in dark wood, of a kind I had only ever previously seen on sale in Crest. The decor is completed, by the window, with the addition of a large blue pale pink and white Chinese vase, the pink picked out by garishly hot artificial pink roses inside.

I should say that I have not tried the food. The reason for this was that I did not have time when I visited today. The other reason, if I had had time, was that there was a rather strange unventilated greasy sourness to the aroma which met my nose on entry. Maybe things are better earlier on in the day, when they would be selling their egg, bacon, sausage and chips combination for £3.00, or £2.95 if bubble replaced the chips. There are a number of set meal fry-up combinations, the most ambitious and eccentric of which involves tea or coffee and 2 slices of bread or toast, 2 eggs, bacon, 2 sausages, beans, mushrooms, tomatoes and, of all things, onion rings! Not really a Fully English offering, that one. Extra ingredients, for 80p, include black pudding. Lasagna, Salad and Chips comes for £4.45.

Next door to Collins Ltd is Scope, a charity shop in aid of cerebral palsy which is currently trying to convince the public that it has something called a 'Springwear Collection' available among the second hand goods and books that are on sale.

Intelligentgiving.com rates Scope better than the nearby British Heart Foundation, as 65% of the money they spend is classed as 'charitable' activity, and they do not hoard all their cash in the bank without putting it to good use (they have a 3 month operating reserve). As well as raising awareness of cerebral palsy - the word 'spastic', so prevalent in my childhood, has all but gone from the lexicon of common insults - the charity are involved in public campaigning on disability discrimination, lobbying and influencing government on disability issues, education, residential care and job placements.

They do, however, tend to over-price their second hand books, which are much more expensive than at Oxfam or Crest and some of which can even be acquired cheaper on ebay.

Next door to the Central Library is a bookmakers, where punters can watch events 'exclusively' on Turf TV with a view to betting on the outcomes. Somehow I doubt that this channel is as exclusive as they say. I would reckon there are a whole load of other bookies round the country which share this service.

Collins Ltd has local competition for the over-optimistic pound from Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, the Tote, Metrobet, the National Lottery, Cairn's Amusements and two Quicksilvers. Customers with less than that left over can cross the road to the 99p Store at the corner of the High Street and Cleveland Park Road.

The earliest non-temple or palace library known to historians, dates from 1200 BC at Ugarit. The first publicly accessible library in the UK is reputed to have been founded in Grantham in 1598. Our Walthamstow Library, formerly the Central Library, is coming up for its centenary next year. It nearly burned down in 1982, with the loss of the Russian collection, but survived at the top of our High Street nonetheless. It underwent a refurbishment reputed to have cost £3.5million a couple of years ago, blending elements of the old Edwardian edifice with architecture which would do credit to the Mall which faces it across the Town Square, and the new bus station in all its spanking elegance to the rear.

The building has its detractors, particularly people who have complained about squeaky floors, a lack of books and a large tank of fish near the entrance. To these, I must point out that entrance area is bright and welcoming, if slightly over-heated for an atrium housing an exhibition on the topic of energy efficiency. (This does include a rather bizarrely misleading poster for what is supposed to be a place of learning with the panicky screaming headline "Warning CO2". CO2 is harmless to humans.)

Entry is to the right of what was, on my visit today, an unmanned desk. As are all library entrances these days, I expect, this one was laden with various brochures pursuing the local authority's line on topics such as Safer Neighbourhoods, Housing and rent arrears. It also had a hilariously inept leaflet called 'What's on and Where, Waltham Forest'.

I collected one. This very glossy sheet of thick, expensively folded paper is produced by a body called 'ExCel London'. It told me what the highlights of my April in Walthamstow will be: the London Marathon, (miles away), a performance of Bugsy Malone in Edmonton, (also miles away), an Abba Tribute Night in Woodford (£29.50 at the County Hotel) and a re-enactment by the Napoleonic Association at Waltham Abbey (Miles away). I wonder why Waltham Forest College and Waltham Forest Adoption Services paid good public money to advertise in this?

Still, it is in the nature of the thirst for knowledge that libraries are there to both quench and engender, that unpalatable truths will be come across, and I thank the library for this insight into just how parlous is the state of health of the systems of governance that operate in this borough.

But I digress. This is a look at the library, not poor governance. Walking in through the short corridor, I came upon the famous fish tank. I have previously heard at least one Walthamstonian shouting across the street at his councilor about this tank. Apparently, with one section of the public, the idea is a dud. I have to say I had a good look at the offending tank and decided that I liked it. Its paid for, so it should stay. Psychologists will tell you that tropical fish are calming, and given the levels of aggression which we are hoping the public will leave behind them having crossed the Town Square, anything that can achieve that is OK by me. To the left of the tank, just on the other side of a security scanner, are the first of the books. I do not stop to peruse them but study the sign ahead for an idea of the layout. Reference, non-fiction and computers are to the left, fiction, children's books and the audio-visual section straight on.

I turn to the left, along a corridor of dark laminate veneer, familiar to many a customer of the cheaper boutiques that populate the High Street. Suddenly, there is a beautiful real wooden staircase, halfway up which is a magnificent stained glass window. A survivor of the fire and the original improving impulse of our Edwardian forbears. Two words stand out at the centre of the window: Wisdom and Knowledge. Our forebears knew these were not one and the same thing - that both must be striven for. And where to look for these qualities? The window helpfully points the way: Milton, Scott, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bacon. Beneath this inspiring window, the good burghers of Walthamstow installed a set of faux historical 'heraldements' in a pastiche of the Morris Style, as out of date in 1926, (when Miss C. Demain Saunders JP donated them), as the pastiche Gothic which Morris had himself drawn upon as an influence the century before.

At the top of the stairs are more historical whimsies installed by local worthies all too aware in 1909 of how little real history there was in Walthamstow (They did not then see how inspiring the local production of the first motor car or the birth of the film industry might later have been as a theme). So there are a set of rather silly genealogies linking worthies from in or around Walthamstow to the Houses of Beauchamp and Neville, De Roos, Maynary, the Carolingians, the Vikings, and, my particular favourite, Joffre the Hairy.

Turning left at the tops of the landing after admiring the excellent carved woodwork of the stairs, I enter the reference library. There are people who think there is something wrong with this room. I can see nothing wrong with it. There are two shelves of reference books, three shelves of non-fiction, plenty of upholstered library chairs, two large tables accommodating as many local scholars as would fit and two library staff on hand to help with any requests. What I can hear is near silence, except for the cross-channel ferry engine room hum of the air-conditioning in the background. The room is spacious. The air is dry and warm. The room is agreeably bright due to the wonderful windows, white tastefully embellished vaulted ceiling and the modern hanging lights. The reference room was doing exactly what I expect such a room to do in a library, and doing it well.

The computer room, which is downstairs, is basically a long room with a table down its length. There are twenty stations in this room, all being used when i looked in, quietly and intently. At a small side table were a couple of young men working quietly together with a pair of laptops.

I enter another room: more non fiction. Seven double sided shelves of history, cooking, travel, hobbies and the arts. One whole side of a shelf with books in Polish, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Hindi, Turkish, Chinese and Arabic, though interestingly in view of what was lost in the fire, and the current arrival of Russian Speakers to the borough, still no Russian texts. All the tables and chairs were being used. There was no talking.

So on into the fiction section. This was area with most people, and there was, in contrast to the other rooms, a fair bit of talking, but public decorum was still the order of the day. Noise did not seem to be disturbing the people at the computers which were spread out along the sides of the room. The real noise was visual: I was faced with 8 large double sided shelves in orange. The seats for readers are purple. This colour scheme will date, if it doesn't send the library staff round the bend before then.

I also took in the excellent green themed children's area and peered into the audio-visual room, not something I have been interested in since so much material has been on-line. This completed a visual inspection of the library.

But a library is not a thing of beauty alone. It has a job to do. In an age when according to Dan Fesperman, author of The Prisoner of Guantanamo and The Amateur Spy, "Every culture in the world is just one good shove away from the precipice of barbarism," libraries are where the knowledge and wisdom of the world rests awhile on its never-ending journey through time and space to speak to present and future generations. Its where Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bacon and Scott congregate on the shelves to shake their gentle heads at man's folly. Not that very many people read Scott any more.

So what should they read? I have my own opinions, but it may be a little unfair to expect my tastes to be present on the shelves. How to resolve this problem of seeming like another hyper-critic of the library service simply because some book I wanted to read was not available. According to the Waltham Forest Guardian almost a quarter of a million books have gone missing from Waltham Forest libraries amid claims, substantiated by ex-library staff, that they have been burned or pulped. I don't want to be unfair. How can I expect them to preempt my every whim by saving a book I want to read?

If it isn't in, they can, as they say, get it on order. So how to test whether the place works in a manner that would be fair to the council? I was pondering this when the shelves spoke to me. Rather, the photographic embellishments following the refurbishments gave me the answer. At the end of the shelves are some inspiring photographs of readers. The yellow non fiction shelves have a dread-locked woman reading Oscar Wilde's Happy Prince. The Blue Reference shelves have two men (who are dressed like the council bin-men who are alleged to have helped pulp all those books), one apparently engrossed in a book about football, and the other smiling to himself at the thought of being immortalised locally holding a copy of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The orange fiction shelves, for a reason known only to the designer, has a middle aged white lady reading a book entitled 'Fifty Great Curries of India' by Camelia Panjabi.

I wouldn't ask if the library had enough books. A library can never have enough books. I would ask if it had these books. If I asked for them, how could the library staff help me out? I chose my moment, a moment when I thought I could take up a little of the kind looking lady's time without inconveniencing any other users. The first book I asked for, feigning ignorance, was the 'The Little Prince', by Oscar Wilde. (I had checked the shelves, and the only Wilde in the whole library was the Wordsworth edition (the very cheap one stocked at Books Ink) of Three Plays. The librarian was very kind, letting me know she thought the Little Prince was possibly by someone else. Maybe I wanted 'The Happy Prince'? I warmed to her immediately, though we were both disappointed to learn that the computer said the book was still on the shelf. It was just my eyes that told me it wasn't. The next book was the Victor Hugo. We presumed it would have to be in English, as there is no stock of French books in the library. This was out on loan, due back in April. Someone local is still reading improving classics it seems, no matter they are ones ruined for me by Lloyd-Weber. The last throw of the dice was 'Fifty Great Curries of India'. I asked for 'Curries of India'. The computer corrected me. And then said I couldn't have it. It is kept in Leyton, and is out on loan.

One further thought on the Library. At the head of the page of the European Commission’s official website, the Walthamtsow Library is listed as a source to contact for advice on Governance. I am inclined to ask whether a Waltham Forest library service that can lose or destroy some 60% of its stock in a two year period and close down a whole library at St James Street without proper public consultation or consent, would really be the best place to go for such advice?

In summary, of three books inadvertently recommended by the library's designer, none were to be had. One had gone astray, but two are performing their legitimate functions as library books. From the library's point of view, two out of three may not be bad. But as a quest for specific knowledge (had it been a real one), it would have left me very disappointed. The building was great. I could see it was being used to full capacity and some of the staff were doing their best in the circumstances. I'll just have to go down to Oxfam to get something to read.

BHS, at 38-42 Selbourne Walk, is next door to Grillers, and has an entrance on the corner of the Town Square as well as from inside the Mall.

Ours is one of 180+ such stores in the UK. The first BHS was opened in 1928 at the other end of the Victoria line in Brixton. Since 2000, they have been part of the retail empire of Sir Philip Green. The Walthamstow store sells lighting and household items like kitchenware, cutlery, crockery, towels, bedlinen and serviceable, but not particularly spectacular, clothing. It also has a cafe.

Grillers is one of those halal chicken places, which seem to have some popularity with young muslims in East London, if the genuine comment of approval I was able to find on the internet about this place can be separated from astroturf marketing. I have seen it compared to Nandos, (which does not have a branch closer than the one in Stoke Newington).

The shop sells Peri Peri Chicken, Grilled Chicken and Burgers (99p for a small burger, and various 'meal' offers around £1.99), as well as Pizzas. They currently have a buy one get one free offer on 7" pizzas for £1.50. Their unique selling point, in contrast with with Mega Bite and Perfect Fried Chicken, is that although they will also sell what they describe as "Fried Style Chicken", their main chicken offer is grilled chicken - "Healthy without frying, no fat, no oil".

If the use of a restaurant by other customers is an indication of worthwhile, anyone wondering where our plastic policemen are 'patrolling' once they have left the safety of the neighbourhood police station might like to know I have seen some of them in here quite often in recent months. Maybe the delicious Peri Peri is preferable to carrying on a few meters up the road past the next door BHS and being confronted with any unpleasantness in the Town Square. Also next door to Noble Travel and Money Exchange.

At 198A High Street is a business which calls itself a travel agent, though, when I recently had a look, there were no conventional signs of any activities as a travel agency on the premises, like there are at Iqbal Travel. No adverts of places to jet off to, no models of planes in the livery of the airlines they act as agents for. No proud symbols of membership of travel agency bodies are on obvious display.

We have here a very spartan establishment indeed, more clinical and intimidating than welcoming or redolent of happy journeys planned or returned from. There are a few very low chairs facing glass screens, on the other side of which sit a couple of bored staff. Transactions seem rather more formal than the very fast and efficient money changing that can be had at the Post Office, for instance.

There are signs suggestive of a trade in foreign money: they have rates for the Euro and US Dollar quoted in the window, and the Pakistani Rupee is referred to in a sign placed above head height, facing the door inside.

Between Quicksilver at 196 and Grillers.