It’s our annual New Year public service announcement.

Redbridge Council will collect your Christmas tree from outside your house, and take it away for composting. And the best bit about it is that you can request the collection online by entering your details at this page: Request Green Waste Collection. Once booked, trees should be collected within 10 days, though you will have to leave the tree at the edge of your property.

That won’t please the excessively houseproud, but is better than getting old fir tree resin smeared on your jeans.

• There are plans for more phone masts in Redbridge, including one near Snaresbrook primary school. While some people still have concerns about health, but the demand for mobile phone coverage continues to grow. A BBC survey last year of areas without reliable 3G coverage found a sizeable gap around Hermon Hill (pictured) which a new mast might address.

• Parents wanting their children to enter primary schools in Wanstead have until next week to submit their application (via www.redbridge.gov.uk/eAdmissions). As these figures below from the 2011 entry show, Wanstead schools are much in demand. The main criteria for application to non-faith schools are whether children have siblings already at the school, and how close they live to the school. Though each of Wanstead’s two faith schools technically will admit children not of their faiths, the figures show that for Our Lady’s, out of 60 children, 36 were baptised Catholics and 26 who were baptised Catholics with siblings in the school. For Wanstead Church school, out of 30 children enrolled, 27 came from families ‘at the heart of the Anglican church’, two from families ‘committed to the Anglican church’ and one who had a sibling in the school.

• The Wanstead and Woodford University of the Third Age, for people who are retired, semi-retired or no longer working full-time is holding its inaugural meeting on Tuesday.

• A beagle which was found in Wanstead earlier this week (and about which there was much tweeting) has been reunited with its owners.

Anyone can add an event to the Wansteadium Events calendar by sending details to events@wansteadium.com. Wansteadium now has more than 1,200 regular followers in Wanstead so it’s a great way to let people know what’s going on.

[google-calendar-events id=”1″ type=”list” title=”Events on” max=”10″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/LauraCMcG/status/154133060982546432″]

Now 2011 is out of the way, you might be interested in how many people read Wansteadium last year, and what they were reading.

Our readership figures (recorded by Google Analytics) were:

64,028

visits in total, from

26,096

different people (“unique visitors”).
There were an almighty

113,191

pageviews in the year.

Far and away the biggest story of the year for us was the summer rioting, with the tension in Wanstead High Street and trouble in South Woodford leading thousands of readers to come over two days. The top 10 most read pages (excluding index pages) was:

1. South Woodford hit – Wanstead nervous (July)

2. Wanstead driving test routes mapped (May 2010)

3. Review: The Larder in Bethnal Green. Yes. Bethnal Green! (April)

4. Hadley House, arrivederci (October 2010)

5. Reviews of Wanstead’s new steakhouse (September 2010)

6. Turkish delight reviews (October)

7. About Wansteadium

8. At last – a buyer for Andrews’ Builders Merchant (April Fool)

9. Nice Croissant gets dissed (May)

10. Wanstead’s Massage surprise (December 2010)

Thank you to everyone who’s read Wansteadium in the past year. It’s been great fun putting it together, especially welcoming new voices like George C Parker, Suki Orange and gardener Ron. There’ll be more property, food and gardening in the year to come, but if you are interested in joining their ranks (we’re particularly interested to hear from people with a passion for books, culture, cricket and parenting) then please do drop us a line at wansteadium@gmail.com.