Editor

A new map has been released locating all the Tin in a Bin foodbank collection points.

“We now stretch to Newbury Park in the east, Forest Gate in the south and Woodford in the north. We are always looking for more collectors, so if you live in a road or area not already covered on the map and would like to join our 50-plus network, please let us know,” said James Paterson.

Current foodbank requirements include tinned food, rice, pasta, pasta sauces, jams, peanut butter, cereals and long-life milk.

Visit swvg.co.uk/tinabsites

Community gardeners have used a ‘no-dig’ method to revitalise the patch of land known as Eastwood Green opposite George Lane roundabout.

Instead of digging or using weedkiller, the volunteers covered the site in cardboard to kill off the grass and piled compost on top. “When it comes to preparing the ground for seeds, removing the turf and rotavating is the usual method. We decided against this as it would be damaging to the birch tree roots, so we used the ‘no-dig’ method. By the time the cardboard breaks down, the grass is gone and there is a nice clean layer of compost on top to sow and plant into,” said Stephanie Derby.

A wildflower meadow has been sown, with plans to install benches and a tapestry lawn in the coming months.

“If you’d like to get involved with volunteering, please get in touch. We hold volunteer sessions on an ad-hoc basis on both weekdays and weekends.”

Email e18society@gmail.com

A consultation has been launched on the City of London’s plans for habitat conservation across a number of Epping Forest sites, including Wanstead Flats, Leyton Flats and Gilbert’s Slade.

“We are currently planning the next 10-year programme for habitat conservation in Epping Forest. The work is due to start in 2024 and we would like your feedback on our proposals,” said a spokesperson. The consultation closes on 10 March.

Visit swvg.co.uk/efplan

The Woodford and Wanstead Photographic Society were victorious in the Romford Gold Cup interclub competition held in February.

“It was a print competition between six clubs. We submitted five images from different club members and got 96 points and came first. In addition, David Tyrrell won the best print of the night award with his photo entitled Tranquillity,” said club chair Sue Rosner.

The photographers whose work helped secure the victory were David Tyrrell, Bob Gibbons, Chris Saunders, Luciano Ocesca and Carole Milligan.

Redbridge Council is considering the future of Wanstead Youth Centre, which it claims is in need of over £2.4m of refurbishments.

But campaigners have objected to the style of questioning used in the consultation – which runs until 13 March – and insist the Elmcroft Avenue venue is a vital resource in a good state of repair.

If the closure is progressed, groups that use the centre will need to find alternative premises by May.

An on-site public meeting will take place on 7 March from 7.30pm.

Visit swvg.co.uk/youthcentre

Volunteers joined Vision RCL’s nature conservation rangers in February for a community tree planting day in Roding Valley Park, near Charlie Brown’s Roundabout.

“We planted elm trees donated by our partner Butterfly Conservation. These trees will help the white-letter hairstreak butterfly, a species solely reliant on elm trees to complete its life cycle,” said Tajinder Lachhar.

Following the outbreak of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s and 1980s, the UK population of white-letter hairstreak butterflies dropped by 96%.

Residents are invited to be part of the Redbridge Climate Forum and help tackle climate change in Redbridge.

Since launching in September 2021, the Redbridge Climate Forum has been a platform for bringing local communities together in the fight against climate change. With 70 members and growing, forum participants exchange ideas and highlight work taking place to support greener living and working in Redbridge.

The next forum meeting will take place on 28 February from 6.30pm to 8.30pm at Redbridge Town Hall. The event will begin with an update on Redbridge’s Climate Change Action Plan from Cabinet Member for Environment and Civic Pride, Councillor Jo Blackman. Special guest Jose Baladron from charity TRAID will also be speaking about the environmental impact of clothing waste and a new partnership project with Redbridge.

“There will also be lots of opportunities for networking, learning and ideas sharing with other active, eco-minded groups and individuals in the borough, as well as finding out more about local green projects and how to get involved,” said a council spokesperson.

The forum is free to attend, and is open to all local people, businesses and community groups. You don’t need to have attended any previous forums to take part.

Click here for more information on the February Climate Forum, and to register your interest in attending.

Alongside traditional work, Woodford Green artist Mark Lewis creates images using digital imaging techniques, like this view of Hollow Pond and Leyton Flats, drawn on an iPad

I am a designer-maker, specialising in silversmithing and jewellery, and also a landscape artist. I worked for a major jewellery and silver manufacturer in London before establishing my own workshop in 1981. 

In 1985, I entered full-time teaching, although I continued to maintain a freelance consultancy. Until the summer of 2009, I was a principal lecturer in the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design at London Metropolitan University. I currently lecture part-time at the Goldsmiths’ Centre in London and was, until recently, a part-time lecturer at Birmingham City University and the University of Creative Arts in Surrey.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Horners. I’m also interested in folklore, especially seasonal traditions, and am an active member of the Folklore Society.

In the last 20 years, I have actively pursued an interest in the history and practice of landscape painting and drawing. I work with both traditional and digital imaging techniques. Drawing is my greatest artistic passion.

I am also interested in the relationship between art and spirituality. Some drawings are generated on an iPad and produced as giclee prints. My long-standing interest in lighthouses is reflected in my love of maritime landscapes and the contrasts between man-made structures and the wild and often unpredictable environment of coastal terrain. These places continue to provide powerful inspiration for some of my recent work. 

However, my current work focuses on expressive and gestural mark-making, responding to the hidden energies and textures in the landscape and is gradually pushing towards semi-abstraction. My latest drawings have celebrated the Essex coast and countryside, and a recent solo exhibition of drawings at the Epping Forest Visitor Centre in Chingford drew inspiration from the drama of light and shade and the sense of mystery they evoke in the forest environs.

I enjoy the immediacy of working with sketchbooks and I’m never without one!

Mark runs bespoke workshops and training courses on iPad painting, drawing technique, creativity and design. For more information and to view more of Mark’s work, visit marklewisart.co.uk or following him on Instagram @mlewis342

Derek Inkpin from local solicitors Wiseman Lee looks at the problems of family disputes in relation to inheritance and wills and explains the importance of equity and mediation

What if your father who owns his farm says to you: “One day, all this will be yours,” but then years later, you fall out and your father changes his will to exclude you and leaves the farm to your brother? Can the law help you? Would your answer be any different if, based on the above promise, you worked on the farm for low wages for many years because you relied on that promise, and then have to leave the farm cottage you were given to find employment elsewhere?

Normally speaking, a promise is not enforceable unless it is made part of a contract. Another aspect is that we are free to change our will until death. However, if we act to our detriment by relying on a promise of inheritance and give up getting a better-paid job elsewhere to work on the farm, the verbal promise given to you earlier will likely be enforceable.

There is something called equity, which will put right an injustice where the law would not normally help. Equity will restrain the rigid application of legal rules where the outcome would be unconscionable and therefore unfair because you have been given a promise but later that promise to confer property on you is broken. 

The remedy which you ask the court to decide in your favour is called proprietary estoppel. This sounds rather quaint, but put simply, means a person cannot break a promise without the court stepping in to stop an unfair outcome. If this explanation seems an obvious result, what the courts continuously have to do is to resolve a clash of legal principles. For example, on the one hand, having the freedom to make a will of your choosing but having that will overturned because something was said many years before which contradicts the will.

Family disputes, of course, can get very complicated and expensive because the persons in dispute see their family relationship fall apart with the worry of how the dispute is to be paid for. Against that, the arguments both for and against raise really important principles which, understandably, people are not prepared to forgo.

One of the major changes in my working lifetime is the use of mediation. Instead, therefore, of listening to both parties’ barristers slugging it out in court with the huge legal costs normally being paid by the loser, there is much to be said for the appointment of an experienced mediator, who helps both sides at a fairly early stage make their own contributions to the process and, hopefully, an agreed outcome, with your lawyer to help you during the process.

Wiseman Lee is located at 9–13 Cambridge Park, Wanstead, E11 2PU. For more information, call 020 8215 1000

A local theatre group celebrating its 100th year will stage a production of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime – a comedy thriller based on a story by Oscar Wilde – in South Woodford in February.

Formerly known as The Wanstead Players, the company was founded in 1923. In 2020, after 43 years at the Kenneth More Theatre, the group rebranded as WP Drama and relocated to Redbridge Drama Centre on Churchfields.

The show runs from 23 to 25 February (7.30pm; tickets: £15.50), with a Sunday matinée on 26 February (3pm).

Call 020 8708 8803 or visit swvg.co.uk/lordarthur

This month, The East of London Family History Society welcomes Sarah Wise to Wanstead Library, who will be talking about the Victorian workhouses of east London

The workhouse was just about the most feared and hated of all Victorian institutions – every bit as terrifying as prison and the ‘lunatic’ asylum. It wouldn’t be abolished (along with the entire machinery of the Victorian Poor Law) until 1929, but it continued to cast a long shadow across the family memories of many people – my own late mother included.

In the ‘General Mixed Workhouse’ were mingled together the able-bodied, the aged, children, the infirm, the acutely sick and the so-called ‘morally degenerate’. The Poor Law Commission declared in 1909 that this was why it was such a terrible method of dealing with poverty: “The continuous social intercourse between young and old, hardened and innocent, loafer and genuinely out-of-work.” Their report approvingly quoted one chairman of the Board of Guardians of the Poor as saying: “To the reputable clean-minded inmate, this association with the depraved is the bitterest and most humiliating experience.” There were, in 1909, some 24,000 children under the age of 16 in the workhouses of England and Wales, and while the Commission had discovered no large-scale child neglect or cruelty, nevertheless, the effect of workhouse life on a child’s spiritual and intellectual well-being was felt to be immense.

As one example, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, problems continued at the Bethnal Green Workhouse – in particular, their tardiness in adding an infirmary wing, to which the poor of the locality could go when ill or after an accident. Overcrowding was a perennial problem, and cleanliness and lack of good lighting were often cited. Extra premises for an overspill workhouse were leased out of the borough – in Well Street, Hackney – but this was a short-term solution. The Local Government Board (the Whitehall body that oversaw the nation’s workhouses) made a long and unannounced visit to Bethnal Green in 1894 and issued a damning report on the conditions and the corrupt awarding of contracts to supply the workhouse. 

Whether old or new, big or small, rural or urban, the workhouses of the nation were felt to be increasingly out of step with how a modern, technologically advanced country ought to be providing for those who were unable to compete in the workplace. This is why we see, from the early 1880s onwards, a concerted campaign to ‘humanise’ them, with many more creature comforts, better food, entertainments and hobbies.

In my illustrated talk, I’ll be focusing on these changes, with an emphasis on the London experience, and in particular, how the Bethnal Green workhouse was run.

Sarah’s talk will take place at Wanstead Library on 18 January from 7.30pm (visitors: £3). Call 07762 514 238

For more information on Sarah’s research, visit sarahwise.co.uk

Voice-over artist Sally Dunbar gives us the inside story on the Redbridge Talking Newspaper, a weekly publication for those living with blindness or visual impairment. And as a free service, more volunteers are needed

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin… From the popularity of yesterday’s radio programmes like Listen with Mother, to the long-running TV show Jackanory, through to today’s boom in audiobooks, being read to is something we all respond to on a very instinctive level: the reassurance of a friendly voice in our ear; the shared experience of the story.

It is these kinds of human interactions that are integral to our existence. Something highlighted so strikingly during the pandemic, which denied us the enjoyment and comfort of social contact with others. For those living with blindness or visual impairment, however, those feelings didn’t necessarily go away when lockdown ended. A talking newspaper can help these people stay in contact with their local community.

As a voice-over artist, I spend much of my time talking to other people through the medium of radio and television; narrating stories, imparting information and being a reassuring voice. It is a job I love and have been doing for over 20 years. But it’s much more than a job. I also spend my free time reading to people and using these same skills in whatever way I can. So, when my friend, Chichi Parish, a volunteer news editor for the Redbridge Talking Newspaper (RTN), told me they were looking for more readers, I jumped at the chance.

RTN is run by a dedicated team of volunteers, headed up by Paul Campbell, whose enthusiasm and energy is inspiring. He dedicates much of his time to organising and running the team of around 50 volunteers, who put the talking newspaper together every week. Each edition runs for about 90 minutes and includes local headlines, news stories, a magazine feature, some music and a quiz. It is a free service and the programmes are copied onto memory sticks and posted out to about 50 listeners each week, with many more listening online.

“I’ve been listening to RTN for 20 years and particularly value the local news as it’s difficult for me to get this anywhere else, but the recordings really have something for everyone and are a wonderful achievement. I really appreciate so many people giving up time to produce them,” said listener Clare Gailans.

It’s marvellous to know that the RTN started life in 1976 and is still going strong today. Even during lockdown, production didn’t stop. We changed to monthly editions and all recorded from home. Thankfully, we’re now back in our Ilford studio, recording weekly again. We’re always looking for volunteer readers, news editors, engineers and more. If you’d like to get involved, we’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, why not have a listen to our latest edition? And, as all stories must come to an end… I’d like to wish you a happy ever after.

For more information on the Redbridge Talking Newspaper and to listen to the latest issue, visit swvg.co.uk/rtn