Elizabeth Street from the first loaf to the last candle

Elizabeth Street is short, and that is part of its charm. It runs from the southern edge of Eaton Square down towards Buckingham Palace Road, where the coach station marks the end of the elegant stretch, and most of what matters lies in the few hundred yards around its crossing with Ebury Street. Pastel shopfronts, window boxes, striped awnings and a steady traffic of dogs on leads give it the air of a village high street that happens to sit a few minutes from Victoria station.

It is also a street with a daily rhythm, and knowing that rhythm is the key to using it well. Mornings belong to bread and flowers, afternoons to shopping, early evenings to the pub on the corner and nights to the small restaurants on and around it. An evening with a companion can join the street at any of those moments, and the best ones often begin earlier than you might expect.

The day starts at Poilâne, the London outpost of the celebrated Paris bakery, where the great round sourdough loaves come out of the oven early and the smell reaches halfway down the street. At the Ebury Street corner, Peggy Porschen's pink-fronted cake shop, framed by an arch of flowers that changes with the seasons, draws a line of photographers most mornings.

In spring the whole street goes further. During Belgravia in Bloom, the neighbourhood's flower festival, which coincides each May with the Chelsea Flower Show, the shopfronts are dressed in extraordinary floral installations, and Elizabeth Street is among the most elaborate. It is one of the prettiest weeks of the year to be in SW1, and one of the busiest.

Rosa, who bakes bread and cakes for pleasure, cannot pass the pink shop without going in to judge the latest creations with a professional eye, and Nora, an early riser who buys her own stems across the river at Nine Elms while most of London sleeps, will tell you which blooms in the windows are in their proper season and which have travelled.

By the afternoon the street becomes a place to wander. Philip Treacy, the milliner whose hats are a fixture of royal weddings and Royal Ascot, has his shop here, and the window alone is worth the walk. Jo Loves, the fragrance house founded by Jo Malone after she left the brand that carries her name, invites you to try scents in unusual ways, and it is a lovely place to spend twenty minutes with someone who enjoys perfume.

An afternoon booking works well here. Three hours for £1,050 allows a slow wander, a coffee at a pavement table, and an unhurried return to your hotel before the evening crowd arrives. Daytime is priced exactly like the evening, and every length of booking is listed on the rates page.

Every village needs a pub, and Elizabeth Street's is The Thomas Cubitt, named after the builder who laid out most of Belgravia in the nineteenth century. On a warm evening the crowd spills onto the pavement with glasses in hand. Upstairs, a calmer dining room serves proper British cooking in a room of polished wood and soft light.

It makes an ideal first meeting point: busy enough that nobody notices a woman arriving to meet someone, relaxed enough that conversation comes easily, and central enough that dinner is a short stroll away wherever you have booked. If the weather turns, the upstairs room is the refuge; if it is fine, a glass on the pavement while Belgravia walks home from work is hard to improve on.

For dinner, the Olivo family of Sardinian restaurants has made this corner of Belgravia its own. Oliveto, on Elizabeth Street itself, is the relaxed pizza room, ideal for an easy supper. Olivo on Eccleston Street is the original, simple and consistently good, and Olivomare on Lower Belgrave Street is the seafood sibling, all white walls and a menu built around fish and shellfish.

For something livelier, Boisdale of Belgravia on Eccleston Street pairs Scottish cooking with regular live music and a terrace for cigar smokers. For a quieter, candlelit dinner, the rooms of Ebury Street and Kinnerton Street are covered in our note on quiet corner tables. Whichever you choose, a four-hour dinner at the corner table, £1,300, gives the evening room to breathe.

By eleven the street has emptied, the shop windows glow for nobody and the only sound is the occasional taxi heading for Victoria. It is the best time for a short walk: up to Eaton Square, where the long terraces glow cream under the streetlamps, or across to Chester Square, one of the most beautiful and least visited squares in London. In December the walk gains an extra glow, when the shops dress their windows for Christmas and the street is strung with lights.

From there, every hotel in Belgravia and Victoria is within a few minutes on foot. Rosa belongs to the curvaceous portraits and Nora to the toned set, and both are natural guides to this street, but Rosie can match the evening to any face in the edit. Write to her with the day and the shape of the plan; the answer comes back with a companion's name and the figure.