Ahead of a talk for the Woodford Historical Society about the development of the local area, Dr Colin Runeckles explains his work digitising the details of local building plans from 1858 to 1965
The heritage section of Redbridge Central Library holds over 40,000 building plans for Ilford and 14,000 for Wanstead and Woodford. These range from an entire area, drainage and street plans, churches, cinemas, stables and garages down to alterations to houses, including installing WCs and additional bedrooms. The majority of the plans are folded and stored in individual envelopes and numbered for identification purposes.
However, it should be noted that not all plans are available; sometimes the original list records that the plan is missing, and what has been left may be a document relating to the building. Where the original list records the exact location of the building, this still has some use to researchers, but where we are left with simply ‘one house’ in a particular street, the value of the record diminishes greatly.
Ilford Historical Society member Carol Franklin took on the task of computerising the details of every Ilford plan onto spreadsheets. The details include the plan number, month and year, building type, house numbers, company, street name, builder and architect, etc. So, for example, if you wanted to look at every plan held by a particular builder – Cameron Corbett, for instance – this can be done very quickly by filtering the spreadsheet. A volunteer made a start on the plans for Wanstead and Woodford and catalogued 1,500 plans dating from 1959 to 1963, and then Sue Page, the then Development Librarian, gave me the more exciting task of going right back to the beginning of the archive for Wanstead, dating from 1858. After I completed Wanstead up to the point the combined borough was formed (1965), I started on Woodford, which dated back to 1875. I finally completed the two areas up to 1965 earlier this year.
Part of my work was to reassign houses to their modern street number as so many were given individual names or terrace numbers when built. As a researcher into the streets and houses of the borough, the original plans and the lists are invaluable for my work into the growth of the area. This is especially true for the years before the earliest detailed Kelly’s Directory of 1900, where knowledge of when roads were laid out or the first houses built can be sketchy to say the least. I am also constructing a full list of roads for the area with the date of them being laid out.
Some of my findings will be the subject of a talk entitled ‘Building Woodford’ for the Woodford Historical Society’s November meeting, where I will show the development of Woodford over the last 150 years or so through a number of these plans.
Colin’s talk will take place on 13 November from 2.30pm at All Saints’ Church hall in Woodford Wells. Visit swvg.co.uk/history
The building plans mentioned in this article are available to view at Redbridge Heritage Centre in Redbridge Central Library. Visit swvg.co.uk/rhc
