[5] The Domesday Book describes Wilcumestou as a manor owned by the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Earl Waltheof of Huntingdon and Northumbria before the Norman conquest of 1066.

When her husband died, c. 1126, Alice gave the church of Walthamstow to the Priors of the Holy Trinity based in Aldgate, London.

By 1870 Walthamstow had grown to the size of a small suburb and a new town hall was built in Orford Road from which affairs of the village were run.

A new town hall designed by architect Philip Dalton Hepworth in the Nordic Classical style was built between 1938 and 1942.Until the late 19th century Walthamstow was largely rural, with a small village centre (now Walthamstow Village) and a number of large estates.

[8] With the advent of the railways and the ensuing suburbanisation in the late 19th century, Walthamstow experienced a large growth in population and speculative building.

In 1885, John Kemp Starley, originally from Church Hill in Walthamstow, designed the first modern bicycle,[10] and in 1892, Frederick Bremer built the first British motorcar in a workshop in his garden, at Connaught Road.

[19] On 29 May 2015, a regular local unicyclist was hit and dragged under by a double decker route 212 bus in Hoe Street.

The village has a small selection of specialist shops, pubs and restaurants, and house prices tend to be higher in the streets of this neighbourhood.

One of the Great Trees of London, the Wood Street Horse Chestnut, is located next to the former Jones's Butchers Shop, a grade II listed, late 18th century weatherboarded building.

[26] Walthamstow has a wide variety of housing stock, but the vast majority of residential property was built in the early 20th century.

Bombing raids in the Second World War and urban redevelopment projects in the 1960s and 1970s have left areas with more modern housing, mostly in the shape of low-rise concrete blocks.

The London Borough of Waltham Forest has proposed developing the area around Blackhorse Road railway station to become a gateway to the town.

Although bounded by the marshes to the west and parts of Epping Forest to the east, there is little open space in the actual town.

It has a formal garden with a pond, and the adjacent Aveling Field has facilities for bowling, tennis, basketball, an outdoor gym, a skate park and a children's play area.

There are two patches of more recent development: Sainsbury's supermarket and the covered shopping centre 17&Central (originally Selborne Walk, then The Mall Walthamstow, badly damaged by a fire in 2019 and fully restored)[31] both of which have large multi-storey car parks.

The historic central library on the High Street was one of many built with money donated by the Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose portrait bust can be seen on the exterior of the building.

Plans for the redevelopment of this site initially fell through in 2005, but work on a new cinema, flats and restaurants started in April 2013 and was completed in December 2014.

[37][38] It is the northern terminus of the London Underground Victoria line, which provides the area with a direct connection to Tottenham, the West End and Brixton.

Lea Bridge is also nearby, served by Greater Anglia trains between Stratford and Bishop's Stortford, via Tottenham Hale and Harlow, with onward connections to Stansted Airport.

To the west, the North Circular passes through Edmonton, Finchley and Brent Cross en route to Chiswick.

To the southeast of nearby Leytonstone, the A12 (Eastern Avenue) carries traffic northeast towards the M25, Romford, and destinations in Essex and Suffolk.

Other routes include: The London Borough of Waltham Forest monitors kerbside and roadside Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) levels in Walthamstow.

This fails to meet the UK National Air Quality Objective set by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) at 40μg/m3.

[43][44] Cycling routes include: The River Lea towpath is also nearby, which provides a direct, traffic-free cycle link from Walthamstow Marshes to Hackney Wick and Stratford to the south, and Tottenham Hale, Enfield Lock, Hertford and Harlow to the north.

The towpath also carries National Cycle Route 1 (NCR 1), an unbroken, signposted cycle route from Dover to the Shetland Islands, which in North London carries cyclists from Canary Wharf to Enfield Lock via Victoria Park and Walthamstow Marshes.

The cinema also operated as a live music venue, with concerts by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, John Coltrane, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Alex Paterson, Johnny Cash, James Brown, The Who, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly.

[50] It closed in 2003 when it was sold to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), which sought permission for a change of use to a place of worship.

UCKG failed to gain planning permission to convert the building from Waltham Forest Council and later from the then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles.

In 2014 the building was sold to a pub company[52] who set up a bar in the grand foyer and began bringing it back into use as a venue.

One of its most famous residents was the writer, poet, designer and socialist William Morris, who was born there on 24 March 1834, and lived there for several years.