Wanstead find-a-book service

Now this feels like real progress. Wanstead’s pride and joy, the Oxfam bookshop, is now offering to take orders.

If there’s a second hand book, CD, DVD or even LP you are after, the shop will take a note of your desire and let you know if it becomes available. To make things even easier, it’s all being co-ordinated through the shop’s Facebook page, which you can find here.

To Wansteadium this all feels like a pretty smart move.

• Incidentally, the shop will be holding a ‘do’ on 9 March from 7pm, for supporters and potential volunteers to get together over tea and cakes and find out more about the charity and the ways people can get involved.

£100,000 ‘overspent’ on Tube tickets in Wanstead

You might not know this, but if you don’t check in or check out your Oyster card at the Tube station – or if the yellow reader is not working – you might be charged the full single fare for the journey, which is £7.

Figures obtained and published by BBC London (available here as a PDF document) show that at Wanstead and Snaresbrook Underground Stations in 2010, £100,000 was charged to people’s cards by this method. That’s £50,000 at each station which people had deducted from their cards either because they didn’t swipe their cards properly, or because there was a technical fault.

But if that sounds bad, a cursory glance at the figures will show that, in the scheme of things, neither station is anywhere near the worst for this happening. But even so, £100,000. (TfL says people can apply for refunds, but that depends on them being aware of having been charged.)

If Wanstead was a horse, what kind of horse would it be?

You might  be carrying the Wanstead handbag. You might even be wearing the Wanstead boots. But if you were riding a horse named Wanstead, what would you be expecting?

Let Wansteadium introduce you to Wanstead Diva, a two-year-old Arabian Filly currently residing in New South Wales. She is, according to her owner, an

Anglo Arab Filly DOB: 12/11/2008, by 100% crabbet stallion out of my beautiful, calm, relaxed, never fizzed, TB mare that done everything, dressage, sj and x country (even played a chukka or 2 of polo) easy mare that was a true all rounder and Diva is going to follow in her mums hoof prints.

Understand all that, and you might be prepared to part with AUS$3,000 for the animal. But what would you get for the money? Suggestions, please, via comments here, or on Facebook or Twitter. (Thanks to spotter @nick_affleck)

UPDATE: Wansteadium reader Philip adds, remarkably:

Naturally if you were riding Wanstead Diva, clutching your Radley Wanstead handbag and wearing your Wanstead boots, you might also want to wear your Wanstead Jodhpurs.

What’s going on with Wanstead tree-chopping?

Noticed the alarmingly large number of street trees in Wanstead and Snaresbrook which have been chopped down and bound in red and white tape, as if to stem the bleeding? If you have, you’re not alone. One Wanstead-resident tweeted last week:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/nutterlane/status/37985874050285570″]

So what’s going on? Wansteadium asked Redbridge Borough Council which helpfully explained thus:

The 2010 annual safety inspection of the 2,621 Highway trees in Wanstead and Snaresbrook identified 104 dead, vandalised or structurally unsound trees. Work to fell, remove stumps and then plant replacement trees, is programmed for completion by 31 March 2011.

In other words, it appears this is not a story about council cuts.