Category: Wansteadium

The Recorder reports the closure of the Stevens Garage on Wellington Road following the retirement of proprietor Brad Stevens after 48 years.

His daughter told the paper: “When my dad first joined the garage in 1976 there were a total of four garages in Wanstead: Wanstead Garage, Browns and Nightingale Motors, all of which were small family-run businesses. 

“Over the course of the years, and with the closure of Browns in 2015, Stevens Motors was the only independent garage in Wanstead.”

Read more here.

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).