Author: Wansteadium

The 2024 Wanstead Fringe is taking place in September again for three weeks starting on Saturday 7th Sept and concluding on Saturday 28th.

The annual cultural festival includes music, theatre, comedy, film, authors, food & drink, the Jumble Trail and more. This year will be its 11th year and organisers are expecting even more events to take place than last year’s total of 130.

Some key dates are: the Duke Street party on Saturday 7th, the Open Air Kinema on Saturday 14th, the Wanstead Festival on Sunday 15th, and the Jumble Trail on Saturday 21st. Other events will be unveiled soon.

Fringe organisers are, however, seeking 73 volunteers to join the Fringe effort, in a wide variety of roles including publicity, customer service, administration, stewarding, fundraising, and also people who want to be involved specifically in the theatre, cinema and book festival events.

More details and a form for volunteers to complete is available at the Fringe website here. wansteadfringe.org

As in previous general elections we’ll share any candidate literature we receive. If you receive some before us, please feel free to photograph it (scanning in Apple Notes on an iPhone is particularly effective) and send it to info@wansteadium.com.

Like an elephant graveyard, a dustbag of half-dead vacuum cleaners assembled on Nutter Lane on Wednesday morning. By the afternoon they had gone their separate ways.

There are eight candidates standing in Leyton and Wanstead at the General Election on 4 July. John Cryer, MP since 2010, is not seeking re-election. In 2019 he had a majority of 20,808.

The candidates are (in alphabetical order as they will appear on the ballot paper):

	Workers Party of Britain	Mahtab Aziz
	Labour	Calvin Bailey
	Rejoin EU	Simon Bezer
	Liberal Democrat	Tara Copeland
	Conservative	Gloria Croxall
	Independent	Shanell Johnson
	Green	Charlotte Lafferty
	Reform UK	David Sandground

The candidates have been invited to a hustings at the Churchill Room at Wanstead Library on 24 June, organised by East London Humanists. More details of that event are here:

General Election Hustings

As expected the major development on the Evergreen Field on Wanstead High Street was approved by Redbridge councillors on Wednesday.

It will mean a block of 24 flats and a children’s day nursery being built on the site, along with a landscaped park and lake to adjoin Christchurch Green. It could also mean an end to the uncertainty which has surrounded the site for decades.

Though the news was welcomed by some, the Wanstead Society was among those regretting it.

Chair Scott Wilding said: “Our view is this is a sad loss of an opportunity to save a piece of land that is classed as Metropolitan Open Land, gives the high street a view of the historic Christ Church Spire – which will now be lost – and could have been saved by the Council for public use as part of the park.

“Of course, there are those who will – rightly – say we need more homes. But the design of the building doesn’t lend itself to a conservation area. It’s a missed opportunity and a decision that can’t be reversed once taken.”

Redbridge Council is expected give the go ahead today for a major development on the Evergreen Field which would mean a block of 24 flats being built on the site.

The development will be three and four-storey blocks with a children’s day nursery on the ground floor, and with part of the site being turned into a new public open space.

All the flats would be classed as “intermediate affordable housing in Shared Ownership”. Redbridge is under an obligation to deliver 1,409 new homes this year – these 24 would count towards that total.

The plan inludes a new landscaped area to the back of the block with a small lake, ownership of which will be transferred to the council. The developers will make a one-off payment of £360,000 to fund Vision maintaining the park for 30 years.

Councillors at the Planning Committee are expected to accept the recommendation of planners that the scheme be approved.

The decision is expected to be a conclusion to a saga which has been running for at least 60 years since two houses which were previously on the site were demolished. The land has stood unused and fenced off since then, though the lack of buildings on one side of the high street has definitely been seen as one of the factors making Wanstead attractive.