Wansteadium

This is no April Fool. Part of the garden of a St Mary’s Avenue house is on the market for £2.2m. It’s what you might call open plan. No bedrooms, no bathrooms, no reception rooms. But it has got planning permission for a bungalow. More details here.

It turns out not to have been such a good idea to close the station car park in March 2024 in anticipation of building works beginning imminently. Twelve whole months of parking revenues gone somewhere else, along with some parking spaces which used to be quite useful.

Good to see the planting of new street trees around Wanstead in the past week, and with them invitations to residents to adopt them. Fans of trees, you know what to do.

Tuesday 1 April marks the 60th anniversary of the merger of Wanstead & Woodford Borough Council with Ilford Borough Council to make Redbridge. It was also the change which moved Wanstead from being part of Essex to become part of Greater London.

One of the options considered for the reorganisation, apparently favoured by some residents of Wanstead and Woodford, was to merge with Leyton rather than Ilford. Various configurations were considered, and in 1962 the Woodford Times ran a competition to name the new borough. Entrants included “Chiglewanwood” (for Chigwell, Wanstead, Woodford), “Wanton” (Wanstead and Leyton) and “Wilfred” (for Wanstead/Woodford and Ilford).

Hermon Hill residents are again appealing for Redbridge to take action following a collision at a spot where last year bollards were knocked down in a similar incident.

Resident Lloyd Sampson said: “In the past few years we have had an air ambulance at the traffic lights, the traffic lights were then separately knocked down as was the old hospital wall twice. It is a ludicrous situation and people genuinely feel unsafe walking down this stretch of Hermon Hill.”

In 2021 hundreds of signatures were collected in a petition calling for road safety on that stretch of road to be addressed, as we reported here.