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Local artist Mark Lewis has opened an exhibition of his work at the Epping Forest Visitor Centre in Chingford, featuring drawings inspired by the local landscape.

“Images depict the rampant chaos of nature, particularly in the summer; a time when one becomes aware of the silent, relentless energy of unbridled natural growth. I am also interested in depicting the juxtaposition of manmade urban structures that encroach on the natural wilderness and the sense of mystery created by the contrast of strong light and shade. The exhibited drawings have evolved from rapidly executed sketches and black-and-white photographs which inform bold and expressive, mark-making images that sometimes push towards semi-abstraction,” said Mark, who lives in Woodford Green.

As well as painting and drawing, Mark is also a designer-maker specialising in silversmithing and jewellery. He studied at the School of Jewellery in Birmingham and has won several local and national design awards. Mark ran his own workshop and studio in the London Docklands for several years before entering full-time teaching. He has lectured in the Sir John Cass Department of Art at London Metropolitan University, Birmingham City University, the University of Creative Arts and the Goldsmiths Centre and many other colleges in London. His educational activities also extend to offering bespoke workshops and training courses on drawing, design and digital painting.

The exhibition is on show at the View Gallery, Epping Forest Visitor Centre, Ranger’s Road, Chingford, London E4 7QH until 30 November (open Tuesday – Sunday, 10am-4pm)

Visit www.marklewisart.co.uk

Discover the creativity and community behind floral art with national demonstrator and Wanstead House manager Kathryn Stangaard, who will be presenting to the Woodford and District Floral Arrangement Group this festive season

For over 20 years, I have been incredibly lucky to be a part of the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies (NAFAS). This has taken me to many places here and abroad as a national demonstrator, speaker, judge and teacher.

The world of floral art, which incorporates flower arranging and floristry, covers a huge range of art and craft techniques, environmental designs, period history and contemporary techniques from around the world. It is as diverse as the people involved.

In my time, I have arranged flowers at Westminster Abbey for both Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III, for services such as Armistice Day, Epiphany, RAF celebrations and Commonwealth Day. I have been involved with huge installations in Selfridges for Chelsea week and exhibited in some of the most prestigious venues in the country. Flower arranging really does get you into places you wouldn’t normally get to see!

Flower arranging is also know to be extremely therapeutic, relieving stress and anxiety, and is also very sociable. We run a class at Wanstead House Community Centre every Friday morning and this is a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours playing with flowers and socialising. Our class was recently involved with the flower festival at Christ Church for the Wanstead Festival and produced some fantastic exhibits around the theme of children’s books.

There are many different periods throughout the year when it’s a busy time with flowers for certain celebrations and holidays, but Christmas is usually one of the busiest. From swags, garlands and table centres to trees and door wreaths, it is the time when most people like to ‘have a go’ themselves, and you can always find classes and workshops locally.

Woodford and District Floral Arrangement Group meet on the third Monday of every month (except December and January), where we have different demonstrators each time who transform flowers and foliage before your eyes into wonderful designs that are then raffled off, so you could be lucky enough to go home with a beautiful arrangement.

This year, for our Christmas meeting, I will be demonstrating some of the latest ideas and techniques, but also showing you some traditional designs for your Christmas décor. So please do join us; all are welcome for fun and flowers, mince pies and a glass of something festive!

The Woodford and District Floral Arrangement Group Christmas event will take place at Wanstead Library on 17 November from 7.30pm (visitors: £9). For more information call 020 8508 9765

For more information on classes at Wanstead House, call 020 8989 3693

Snaresbrook is among 17 London Underground stations that will be assessed for step-free access upgrades.

The shortlisted stations will now undergo detailed feasibility studies, although any future work will be subject to TfL’s finances.

“While TfL will fund these additional studies, the subsequent development and delivery of schemes will be dependent on TfL’s future funding position, with deliverable schemes prioritised where there is significant third-party funding available,” said a spokesperson.

A survey has shown people are unhappy with TfL’s reorganisation of local buses.

Over 80% gave a rating of two stars or less, while 55% expressed complete dissatisfaction, giving zero stars. Within a week, the survey received 150 responses.

Comments included: “This public body is abusing its powers.” “My elderly neighbour is unable to reach a GP.” “My son can no longer get a bus to school – I have to stop work to drive him.”

The survey was run by residents in September on the first anniversary of the W12, W13 and W14 bus route changes.

Three Remembrance services will take place across Wanstead and South Woodford this November.

The first will be held at the Woodford War Memorial, outside St Mary’s Church in South Woodford, on 8 November (arrive by 8.40am).

This will be followed by a gathering at the Wanstead War Memorial on the High Street on 9 November (arrive by 12.15pm).

A final service will take place on Armistice Day at the Snaresbrook Garden of Remembrance, off Snaresbrook Road, opposite Eagle Pond (arrive by 10.45am).

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

Londoners are urged to help fill available blood donation appointments across the capital.

“Currently, there is a particular need for more O negative and B negative donors, as well as more donors of black heritage… By giving an hour of your time, you could save up to three lives,” said an NHS Blood and Transplant spokesperson.

Local donation venues include Hawkey Hall in Woodford and Westfield Stratford City.

Visit blood.co.uk

The Bengali Cultural Association has celebrated 50 years of Durga Puja in the UK with a five-day festival in Woodford.

“We were honoured to host this celebration at the Hawkey Hall, a venue that has become an integral part of our traditions,” said South Woodford resident and president of the association Ajay Ghoshal.

Iain Duncan Smith MP and local schoolchildren were among the guests who attended the event in early October.

Durga Puja is a major Hindu festival honouring the goddess Durga.

London met legal limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution for the first time ever in September. In the first of two articles, Lydia Fraser-Ward reflects on a five-year campaign to help us all breathe more easily

In 2020, taking my two-year-old son to local parks, I began worrying about how healthy it was for him to play outside. Usually, parents would be eager for toddlers to run around green spaces, but our nearest parks, Ray Park and Elmhurst Gardens, sit alongside the M11 and North Circular, two of London’s worst-polluted roads. We spent hours on the swings just a few metres from constant traffic, and I couldn’t stop asking: how harmful was the air we were breathing?

Determined to find answers, I discovered Mums for Lungs, a grassroots organisation founded in 2017 by Jemima Hartshorn. The group campaigns on the health risks of air pollution, particularly for children. I was shocked to learn one in 10 London children suffer from asthma, and that pollution contributes to an estimated 30,000 deaths annually in the UK. It felt like an invisible killer, yet one that rarely makes headlines.

I applied for a new community strand of the Breathe London programme and received one of their first solar-powered air quality sensors, installed in Elmhurst Gardens next to the playground. The sensor measured nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM) hourly. The results were alarming: readings frequently exceeded UK legal limits and surpassed World Health Organization guidelines. Yet, because legal limits are based on annual averages rather than daily exposure, the local authority had no obligation to act.

The fact is, the London Borough of Redbridge knows there’s an issue with pollution in the borough and actually declared itself an Air Quality Management Area back in 2003. But as a borough lacking in essential bus and Tube connections, it’s no surprise many residents rely heavily on vehicles, with 72.5% of Redbridge households owning a car or van in 2023, much higher than the London average.

Air pollution became personal in other ways too. I appeared in a Client Earth video supporting the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which requires owners of the most polluting cars to switch to cleaner alternatives or pay a daily charge. I was saddened to receive online trolling in a local newspaper. It was clear the message wasn’t getting out there about the true risks air pollution posed to local people’s health.

Motivated to act, I began connecting with other concerned residents and started a branch of Mums for Lungs in Redbridge. This marked the beginning of my journey to empower local families, share information and explore practical ways to reduce exposure to harmful pollution in our borough. Understanding the problem was the first step; changing it – as I will explain in the next issue – would require community effort and sustained pressure on local authorities.

Mums for Lungs website: www.mumsforlungs.org/about-air-pollution

Breathe London Community Programme, node data: www.breathelondon-communities.org/

Redbridge School Streets: www.redbridge.gov.uk/roads-and-pavements/redbridge-school-streets/ 

We Care for Our Air on PWLC Projects website: www.pwlcprojects.com/wecareforourair

Redbridge Cycling Campaign: redbridgecycling.org/

Ride for Their Lives: ridefortheirlives.net/

South Woodford will host the borough’s first health practitioner networking event in January, which will ultimately benefit the wider community, says organiser Rena Pathak

As both a holistic practitioner and the coordinator of the South Woodford Business Network, I’ve often been struck by how many health professionals we have right here in our local area, including GPs, pharmacists, opticians, community nurses and a growing number of mental health and wellbeing practitioners. Yet, despite working towards the same goal of improving community health, many of us have never actually met.

That realisation inspired me to organise the first health practitioner networking event in Redbridge, which will take place on 7 January at Lily House in South Woodford. The aim is simple: to bring together local health practitioners from all sectors to meet, share insights and build meaningful connections that will ultimately benefit the community we all serve.

In my conversations with GPs, I’ve discovered that, even within the same area, many have never met the pharmacists or opticians they communicate with daily. The same can be said for community nurses and wellbeing practitioners, who often support the same patients but rarely have the opportunity to collaborate directly. This event is about changing that.

Dr Mary Lou Hanley, a community GP at Southdene Surgery and head of the Wanstead, South Woodford and Woodford Primary Care Network (PCN), has been enthusiastic about the idea from the start. She recognises healthcare delivery is evolving rapidly, with GP practices such as Southdene now working within a primary care team model. This means that alongside the GP, patients can now access a social prescriber, practice pharmacist and care coordinators who make up a primary care team designed to manage most primary health needs without every patient needing to see the doctor first. It’s a more holistic, person-centred approach that meets people where they are. But for it to work well, communication between the primary care team and other professionals in the community is essential. Social prescribing, in particular, relies on GPs and practice staff knowing what health and wellbeing services are available locally, so they can confidently signpost patients to the right support.

Rita Kumar, owner of Lily House, has kindly offered the venue for our first gathering. As she put it: “We are delighted this health networking event will be hosted at Lily House. It will create the perfect atmosphere for meaningful connections and collaboration.”

My hope is that this event will mark the beginning of a more connected and collaborative local health network; one that reflects the compassion and talent already thriving in our community, as well as the possibility of this being replicated in other areas of the borough.

For more information on the networking event, email healingnotesfromafriend@gmail.com

Local resident Shreena Patel reflects on a lifetime of witnessing racism evolve in East London, and explains why she’s now helping to lead the Wanstead and South Woodford Against Racism campaign

I was born in Leytonstone and I now live in Wanstead with my partner and two children. I am British-Asian, and for a small but vocal section of society, Britain is not my home and I do not belong here.

I grew up in East London in the 1980s and 1990s; my first experience of racist abuse was at aged five from someone in my class in primary school. The way racism manifested evolved as I grew up and it became socially unacceptable to be overtly racist. However, I feel that has shifted in the past few years, which is why I became involved in the Wanstead and South Woodford Against Racism campaign.

There has been a significant rise in far-right nationalism and populism in the United Kingdom over the past few years, which has been fuelled by the anti-immigrant rhetoric platformed by mainstream political parties. This has recently culminated with the largest far-right protest in Central London, and a campaign known as ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, which has seen St George and Union Jack flags illegally flying from lampposts. (The Highways Act 1980 prohibits placing or attaching anything to a public highway without consent and bans the placing of any items that could cause danger, obstruction or distraction.) Flags have also been painted on public structures across the country, including in South Woodford, Woodford, Epping and Leytonstone. This campaign has been positioned as an act of patriotism, but the intention is intimidation and division within communities. There has also been an uptick in race-related hate crimes nationally, which is reflected in the experiences of business owners and members of the public within Wanstead and Woodford.

Wanstead and South Woodford Against Racism is an initiative that was born from the broader campaign set up in Leytonstone in response to the St George’s Cross being illegally painted across the area. Wanstead and South Woodford Against Racism sets out to amplify the voices of the quiet majority that support and celebrate the existence of our diverse communities in East London.

As a starting point, we have rolled out a poster campaign to counter the far-right narrative and show that our communities will not stand for any form of racism across religious or ethnic lines. You may have seen our posters in shopfronts along the High Street in Wanstead and George Lane in South Woodford. We have had a huge, positive response from businesses, but we still have more to reach.

Our campaign is run by local volunteers and we are always looking for more people to get involved. Do get in touch if you would like to display a poster in your home or business.

The campaign is run by local volunteers and are looking for more people to get involved. Please contact wansteadagainstracism@gmail.com

If you would like to display a poster in your home, please visit the distribution hubs listed below. There is also have a GofundMe page if you would like to donate to support the activities www.gofundme.com/f/Wanstead-and-South-Woodford-Against-Racism

• Bare Brew, 7 High Street, London E11 2AA
• The Cuckfield, 31 High Street, London E11 2AA
• The Bull, 129 High Street, London E11 2RL
• Daisy, 121A High Street, London E11 2RL
• Harveys, 6 Clock House Parade, London E11 2AG
• Bal Beauty, Unit 1, The Cuckfield, Wellington Rd, London E11 2AL
• Touch of Class Drycleaners, 12a Station Parade, High Street Wanstead, London E11 1QF
• International Supermarket, 146-150 George Lane, E18 1AY
• XGadgets, 166 George Lane, E18 1AY