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Councillor Jas Athwal has resigned as leader of Redbridge Council after a decade-long tenure, making him the longest-serving leader since the formation of Redbridge Council in 1965.

It follows his election as MP for Ilford South, where he won a 40.2% share of the vote.

“It has been the honour of my life to serve the people of Redbridge as council leader, and I am immensely proud of our record,” said Councillor Athwal.

Former deputy leader Councillor Kam Rai was elected as his replacement at a council meeting last night.

“I feel so fortunate to represent the place I call home, where we have outstanding schools, safe neighbourhoods, and wonderful parks. Redbridge is a special place, with close-knit and welcoming communities, busy high streets, beautiful green spaces and lots to do – we really have everything we need right on our doorstep, with more on the way,” said Councillor Rai.

Some South Woodford scribbles from DD, our resident diarist and observer of all things local. Illustrated by Evelyn Rowland

What a privilege it was for me to visit and hear the memories of some of South Woodford’s wartime children. Their average age now is 90, but one was 100, and apologised when he wasn’t quite sure of a date. “I’m getting on a bit,” he explained. No more introduction from me; listen to their voices. Perhaps with an occasional smile, perhaps an occasional tear.

Janet
I was nine when the bomb landed in our back garden in Forest Approach on 3 July 1944. We were playing at home, my younger brother and I, and heard an approaching doodlebug. We knew we were safe while we could still hear its engine. (A strange ingredient in our childhood education.) This time, the sound suddenly cut out. We headed straight for our Morrison shelter in the front room. The ‘best room’, where the piano was. Mum, Peter and me, in this strong, solid sort of cage with a mattress inside and a protective grid all round. A terrific bang. Flying glass and brickwork. A huge hole in the wall. We dusted ourselves down. Minutes later, a man in military uniform appeared in our hallway. The large pram Mum used for shopping was kept there. “Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby?” he yelled. There was no baby, of course. That’s what stayed in my memory over the years really, more than the horror of our close escape with death. Mum gathered up all sorts of important documents and possessions, piled them into the pram, and we pushed it up the hill and over the High Road to Empress Avenue, to the grandparents’ house. There were three aunts there too, so it was a bit crowded, but they managed to ‘book’ a place for us to sleep in a brick shelter in the forest up near the Napier Arms. 

Harold
I was eight when the war broke out. My walk to school took me across fields. My mother gave me strict instructions: “If bombers come over, lie flat, facedown, on the ground.” I did lie down. But upward-facing, of course. I wanted to see the bombers! 

John
I was 15 in 1939, at Ilford County High School. Everyone expected something to happen. We were evacuated to Ipswich and then to South Wales. But nothing did happen and in June 1940, I was back home. The Battle of Britain began. I stood gazing up, thrilled. I knew this was for me; I must fly! I volunteered for air crew at 18 and was accepted for pilot training. By 1942, Britain was recruiting thousands of pilots. I was soon off to one of the five British flying schools in America. In Oklahoma. No email then; letters took ages. There was plenty of food; none of the hardships back home. I completed my 200 hours to get my wings on my 20th birthday in 1944. We were a very mixed bunch. If you were ‘public school or university material’, you passed out as a pilot officer. Boys like me from ‘ordinary’ schools became sergeants. I was eventually demobbed as a Warrant Officer, having flown Dakotas and (briefly) Lancasters. You made strong bonds of friendship in those times. One friend from Manchester later became my best man. My full training was completed literally a few days before the end of the war, so I never heard a shot fired in anger. 

Jane
For years, I kept a treasured souvenir of the war in my wardrobe. In Mayfair Gardens, after a raid, we kids took our empty gas mask boxes and collected up all the shrapnel lying amongst the shrubs. We used to swap our finds with each other to secure a good variety of pieces. I was very proud: I had an actual nose cone. I was a bit sad after we moved house to find that neither my shrapnel box nor my teddy bear had come with us.

Gerry
Dad died at the beginning of the war so we had to move in with Grandma and Mum’s sister. Mum was out all hours to do secretarial work from 7am till 5pm. Then she’d grab something to eat and be back out again till about 8pm. The rent had to be paid. Auntie was a health visitor and also in Air Raid Protection. She made a great fuss of me, crawling around the garden with me horse riding on her back. When the sirens went off, we hid under the dresser in the basement. After bombs had dropped nearby, she would say to me: “Shall we go and see which streets have disappeared?” I remember the crowds and the damp smell in the street shelters, but I was too young really to understand or feel afraid. 

David
At school, we children were all required to show that we could put on our gas masks. I was five. I refused point-blank to put it on, even when encouraged by my older cousin. It was ugly and frightening. I ended up being chased around the playground by the teachers and even the headmaster. When my mother was informed of this serious problem, she adopted the psychological approach by placing the gas mask next to my teddy bear. Soon, Teddy was wearing it, and evidently quite happy. It wasn’t long before I tried it out myself. Mum told me I could wear it as a special treat for a few minutes each day, but only if I had been good. She’d done the trick.

Chris
I can remember the death of George V in 1936. By the age of seven, I was at a boarding school in Berkhamsted but living with my grandfather and an aunt in Dublin, so I was travelling (alone!) regularly across the Irish sea for my education. I sort of brought myself up really. My parents were in the colonial service, living in British Malaya. I was 11 when war broke out and most of our younger teachers were called up and things started to fall apart, with retired ex-staff called in to help. There were no interschool sporting rivalries. I missed out on that. The school food went from bad to worse! I didn’t see my father for seven years. For three of these, he was interned by the Japanese. Mother had escaped via Singapore and, amazingly, Cape Town. Dad eventually returned home. He weighed seven stone. “Who’s this man ordering my mother about?” I thought. 

Rowena
I was only three when war broke out. I don’t remember ever being told the war was over. I thought this was the normal status quo, sleeping under the stairs sometimes, going to school and hurrying into an air raid shelter. Stories read to us by torchlight. I used to pray for an air raid on Thursday mornings because that was when we had to sit cross-legged on the floor for hymn practice. We lived in Finchley then. There was only one bomb dropped near me. The house where two elderly sisters lived was destroyed. Mum told me one of the sisters had lost her voice. I saw her one day walking in the ruins; I supposed she must be looking for it. 

Dick
I was six at the beginning and 12 at the end. Father was 39 and called up as an RAF reservist. He was travelling to France the day war was declared, carrying vital equipment for intercepting enemy transmissions as a member of the Wireless Intelligence Service. At my age, it was all hugely interesting; it was tanks and aeroplanes, guns and rockets. I remember sitting reading a book, our old dog beside me. His ears pricked up, even before I heard anything. He’d learnt the meaning of the drone of approaching flying bombs. Mum quickly joined us in the air raid shelter along with our neighbours who’d crawled through a hole in the fence to share it with us. One bomb passing overhead landed in Empress Avenue. I had been crouching down, but when I looked up, I saw sheets of glass flying in. I was never afraid. Rather, I became quite fatalistic. Dad managed to bring himself and his equipment safely out of Brest 10 days after Dunkirk. He admitted in his diary that he’d taken a dip in the Loire en route. Because of the Blitz, Mum and I joined him for two years, now stationed in Islay in the South Hebrides. My reading improved rapidly in the Scottish school and I was into Biggles and other boys’ adventure stories. I remember the lovely sunsets over the mountains, the strong winds and wide landscapes. Other wonderful experiences followed when Dad was posted to a village called Bishampton, in Worcester, and I was helping out on a farm. So far from London, I was regarded almost as an alien, an extraterrestrial even, especially with my temporary Scottish accent. I was so lucky: a suburbanite experiencing wide-ranging country life and returning to dear, familiar Forest Approach, unscathed, when the war was over.

To contact DD with your thoughts or feedback, email dd@swvg.co.uk

Joshua Abbott has launched a crowdfunding campaign to publish Modernism Beyond Metro-land, a book documenting 20th-century architecture in London’s suburbs. In the first of a series of extracts, the spotlight is on South Woodford Library. Photo by Geoff Wilkinson

The London Borough of Redbridge was created in 1965, bringing together the municipal boroughs of Ilford and Wanstead and Woodford, and parts of the boroughs of Dagenham and Chigwell. These fragments had all previously been part of Essex before being transferred to the Greater London area.

Like all of the 32 new boroughs, Redbridge sought to improve their building stock from the late-1960s onwards through their newly created architects departments. Some boroughs like Camden with Neave Brown, or Lambeth with Ted Hollamby, undertook massive housing projects that are now feted as examples of the golden era of social housing. Redbridge’s architects department was led by Michael G Booth, who had worked for the architects department of London County Council, the largest in the world at the time. There, he helped design a range of projects, including schools, colleges and fire stations.  

Booth moved from the London County Council to Redbridge in 1965, joining as deputy borough architect, eventually becoming the youngest chief architect in the 32 boroughs. There, he would oversee the design and construction of housing, schools and other community facilities. Two of the most interesting projects from this period are the libraries in Wanstead and South Woodford.

The library and Churchill Hall in Wanstead were opened in 1969, overseen by Booth. The South Woodford project was completed in 1975, combining a library and health centre. Designed by CA Stok and J Hockley of the borough’s architects department, it is a more complex and ambitious scheme than Wanstead, providing multiple facilities on a site just to the north of the North Circular, previously home to an 18th-century lodge, which was demolished to make way. 

The buildings are constructed of red brick around a concrete frame with black timber window frames. The 1970s saw a backlash against the monolithic concrete designs that had proliferated during the 1960s, with architects turning back to brick, particularly the hot red type used by influential architects James Stirling and James Gowan in their 1960s work, such as the 1963 Engineering Building at Leicester University. However, the concrete frame does appear around the South Woodford building, most notably with the rear staircase. South Woodford Library was refurbished in 2015 and now contains a gym.

For more information on Modernism Beyond Metro-land and to support the crowdfunder, visit swvg.co.uk/mbml

In the third of a series of articles to mark Churchfields Infants’ and Junior School’s 150th anniversary, former pupil Myrtle Watts (class of 2014) reflects on her memories of writing her first book

As an only child, starting school was incredibly exciting. Always very sociable (maybe even too sociable; I often received criticism that I was “too chatty” at parents’ evenings), being thrust into an environment full of other children my age was my idea of heaven. From start to finish, I was lucky enough to have an almost entirely positive experience at Churchfields, with PE the only exception.

To this day I am inept at sports, whether it be with a ball, a racket or a stick of some kind, and this incapability fostered at a young age. As we prepared to move from the infants’ school to the junior school, we were sorted into teams that we would represent during PE and on Sports Day. Placed into the Green team, I clearly remember a fellow student telling me that “the Green team loses everything.” I certainly helped to uphold that reputation; despite being the only student given a wooden egg instead of a real one during the egg and spoon race (due to an egg allergy), I still managed to come last every year. 

While other children would play sports during break time, I instead opted to print off the lyrics to popular songs to take into school and sing with my friends. In the junior school, there was a yearly talent show that I would enter as a singing duo with my friend Nia, and I’m pretty sure we won it more than once! When casting our Year 6 leavers’ production of The Jungle Book, there was fierce competition between us for the only female role in the play (an unnamed girl in the final scene with approximately three lines of singing). Instead of cause what I can only assume would have been an irreconcilable rift in our friendship, our teacher decided to rewrite the scene to have two unnamed girls rather than one.

When I wasn’t singing, I was reading: a complete bookworm as a child, I started writing my own stories from a very young age. At some point in the junior school, I remember writing a book (if you can call it that – I doubt it was more than 10 pages long) and showing it to my teacher, who forwarded it to the headteacher, putting it in the school library! I often wonder whether it’s still there and whether any other students read it. As a soon-to-be graduate of English Literature at the University of York, I can’t help but feel this was one of many moments of encouragement that fostered my love for the subject at a young age.

Eventually leaving the junior school brought a mix of emotions as I anticipated a new chapter at a different secondary school to my friends. Reflecting on my academic journey now, I feel so lucky to have had so much fun and wonder how differently things might have been had I not ended up at Churchfields.

For more information on Churchfields Infants’ School and Churchfields Junior School, visit swvg.co.uk/churchfields

The South Woodford Society will be launching a new website this summer.

“As part of our Design Code work, we are also creating a new website, which will go live in August. This will allow us to incorporate all aspects of our work, such as local events and the business forum, as well as the Neighbourhood Plan and Design Code, bringing all these initiatives together on one site. Over the next few months, we will also be adding interactive maps and even more content,” said a spokesperson.

Visit swvg.co.uk/sws24

Eastwood Green, off George Lane, now features a tapestry lawn, which is a perfect alternative to real and plastic grass, says local gardener Stephanie Derby. Photo by Geoff Wilkinson

In the last issue, I wrote about what the South Woodford Society is doing to help pollinators at Eastwood Green. As well as beautiful flowers, we’ve now created a ‘tapestry lawn’ in front of the bench by the Birch tree.

You might think “what on earth is a tapestry lawn?” Well, it’s an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional grass lawns, which comprises a variety of low-growing plants that suit the conditions of the garden. They need very little to no mowing and can be a gorgeous addition to the garden, especially when using plants that carpet the ground with flowers. As a garden designer, customers often complain about their lawns, whether it’s the high maintenance or the fact they dry out during a drought. Interestingly, ornamental grass lawns originate from aristocracy and it is thought the first one was created at the Palace of Versailles! The idea spread to England and signified wealth, as only the richest could afford to maintain grass purely for aesthetic purposes. Almost all gardens now have some space dedicated to a lawn but many people are now seeking alternatives. 

The past few years has seen a rise in people opting for artificial grass. When asked, 31% say they didn’t want the upkeep of a natural lawn. This is understandable, but plastic grass has many downsides. Aside from the environmental damage it causes, there are health implications too. For instance, artificial grass is made with dangerous levels of PFAs, also known as ‘forever chemicals’. When absorbed or inhaled, these chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects and many other serious health problems. Studies have shown people playing sports on artificial grass are likely to be coated with higher levels of these chemicals and children can be particularly vulnerable as they tend to be in closer contact. What better reason to always opt for real plants over plastic! In recent months, the trend for plastic grass is waning as people are discovering the negatives outweigh the benefits. Demand in the UK in 2023 was down by 66% compared to 2021. 

At Eastwood Green, we created a small tapestry lawn to show people they can create one in their own gardens. Ours is a little wild, as it is maintained ad-hoc by volunteers, but we’ve planted a variety of plants suited to sunny, dry and exposed conditions, and they are thriving. The plants include Chamomile, Creeping Thyme and our beautiful native Harebell. When walked on, these plants release oils that emit gorgeous fragrances, and they are incredibly soft underfoot. This lawn stays green in the height of a dry summer, and never needs to be mown. In summer, the lawn erupts with dainty purple Harebells that are a fantastic nectar source for bees. This mosaic of plants is just one of endless combinations that could be tried in your own garden. I am confident in saying tapestry lawns are a fantastic alternative to both real and plastic lawns. Please do pop over to Eastwood Green and check out what we’ve done.

To help with Eastwood Green gardening, email e18society@gmail.com

For more information on gardening and tapestry lawns, follow Stephanie on Instagram @stephanietaraderby

Rain gardens are helping to reduce flood risks across Redbridge while boosting biodiversity.

“The eco-friendly water drainage systems feature plants, shrubs and other greenery and are designed to absorb rainwater and drain it away slowly to help stop sewer systems from becoming overwhelmed,” said a Redbridge Council spokesperson.

There are now 11 rain gardens across the borough – including one on Malford Grove in South Woodford – which have the capacity to collectively absorb and store around 113,400 litres of rainwater.

Staff from Woodbridge High School will be taking part in the London to Brighton Cycle Ride this September.

“We will be raising money for Great Western Air Ambulance in memory of our colleague, Moyra Whelan, who lost her life in a road traffic collision in the Cotswolds in November 2022. Great Western Air Ambulance were deployed, but she sadly passed away. We have maintained a great relationship with the charity and are attempting to raise £10,000 for them,” said a spokesperson.

Visit swvg.co.uk/whscycle

The South Woodford Society is seeking more members of the community to help organise future events.

“From South Woodford’s Summer Festival to our Christmas lights switch-on and all the gardening days, repair cafés and litter picks in between, these events are wholly organised by local volunteers. We work hard behind the scenes to keep them running and it would be such a great help to have more residents involved to share the tasks and give fresh input,” said a spokesperson.

Email e18society@gmail.com

Auditions for Woodford Pantomime’s next show took place in June.

“After a fantastic turnout and a great showcase of talent at our auditions, our production of Sleeping Beauty has been cast. The whole team is now eagerly awaiting the start of rehearsals in September and looking forward to seeing the show take shape,” said a spokesperson.

The panto – the group’s 62nd annual performance – will run for 12 days at the Sir James Hawkey Hall, opening on 1 January.

Tickets go on sale in September. Visit swvg.co.uk/wpanto

Residents will be able to get their clothes and household items fixed for free with the return of the South Woodford Repair Café on 20 July.

“From small electrical appliances to jeans and bicycles, there are plenty of items that can be salvaged from landfill and given a new lease of life. There will also be a toy swap, information stalls from local community groups and free refreshments available throughout the session,” said a spokesperson. The event runs from 10am to 1pm at Woodford Memorial Hall, 207 High Road.

Visit swvg.co.uk/repair

A local swan rescue volunteer has been praised for her work by the BBC Springwatch Wildlife Hero Awards.

“I’ve been a rescuer for The Swan Sanctuary for many years, and through this I have built up a great network of supporters. This year, many of them messaged to say they had nominated me for the award, and I was greatly surprised when the Springwatch team got in touch to say I was on the shortlist!” said Gill Walker, who was one of 32 finalists from over 1,750 nominations.

To report an injured swan, call 07970 404 866