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South Woodford resident Michelle Vanlint pays tribute to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, reflecting on her 12-hour queue to see the late monarch lying in state and marking the end of an era

I am sure we will all remember where we were when we heard the news of the Queen’s death and how we felt. I didn’t expect to be so sad and emotional.

Only a few days later, we found ourselves in Edinburgh, dropping our younger son off at university when we discovered Her Late Majesty was being driven from Balmoral to Holyrood Palace. My husband, son and I joined the incredible number of people lining the road. As the convoy drove along the Royal Mile, the crowds of people cheered as she passed by. We were due to drive back to London the next morning, but as the procession, which included the Queen’s children, was going to pass by again, I felt compelled to delay our departure. The solemnity of the occasion was felt by everyone, and the crowd fell silent as the horse-led procession passed by.

Back in London, the news was full of interviews with people waiting in the queue to see the Queen lying in state. Queen Elizabeth II had kept her promise and devoted her life to serving us, so joining the queue to pay my respects was the least I could do. I arrived at Southwark Park on Friday afternoon and joined the queue immediately. The sun was shining and the queue was moving, albeit slowly. The atmosphere was cheery as people struck up conversations. It took another three hours until we made it to City Hall, where we were given our wristbands. It was then a slow stop-and-start all the way along the South Bank, but seeing all the famous London landmarks flooded in a sea of purple was worthy compensation. It started to get cold and some of my new ‘friends’ did a pizza run to keep us going. The approach to Westminster was rather like the beginning, a long, snaking queue; we were so near yet still had several hours to go. Eventually, we got through security and then heard the queue was going to be closed for cleaning. We couldn’t possibly wait outside the hall for another hour, so we made a dash, and myself and my ‘friends’ made it inside just before the doors closed. It was 3am, 12 hours after I joined the queue.

As we made our way into the hall, there was a loud drum which signified the changing of the guard; this was an unexpected bonus. The very formal ceremony took about 10 minutes with the guards moving in a very mechanical way. The hall was then silent again and we were able to pass by the coffin. I felt honoured and privileged to have been able to witness such an historical event. Women seemed to be in the majority in the queue. Was this perhaps because the Queen was such an outstanding role model for us?

As I was fortunate to have been at both Westminster and Edinburgh, it was evident so many people from around the world were brought together with the utmost respect for the Queen; it wasn’t just the British. It was a surreal experience, one I will never forget.

For more information on the life of Queen Elizabeth II, visit swvg.co.uk/queen

The Woodford Greeners has launched a crowdfunding campaign to restore a small section of land in Ray Park and turn it into a community garden.

“If we get enough pledges, we will install a standpipe and irrigation hoses, so we have a regular water supply. The area will include a medicinal garden as well as a patch for bee-friendly colourful perennial flowers. We will also erect a pergola-style gazebo to provide an area for workshops,” said a spokesperson.

The group is seeking to raise £6,200.

Visit swvg.co.uk/ray

Councillor Rosa Gomez (Churchfields Ward, Labour) was a shortlisted finalist in the Local Government Information Unit’s national Resilience and Recovery awards, held in Bath in October.

A lifelong campaigner for human rights and a former immigration detention adviser, Rosa was subjected to an attempt on her life in Colombia in 2010. Although suffering life-changing injuries, her experience inspired her to work to empower communities.

She was first elected in 2018 and re-elected in May with an increased majority.

Local photographer Geoff Wilkinson will be holding a new exhibition of images documenting the East End of London on 19 November, with the display also featuring South Woodford scenes.

“The East End continues apace with change, which is why I still feel compelled to capture the traditional mood and atmosphere before it disappears,” said Geoff, who will be opening his gallery at 84 Nightingale Lane, Wanstead from 6pm to 9pm for the show.

“Since my last exhibition in 2019, change seems to be happening at an even faster pace. These latest images, therefore, are even more significant. With these pictures, I have expanded the area I capture to include South Woodford and Wanstead. When I look at changing inner east London, it’s easy to forget the streets and buildings closer to home, which are also changing.”

Call 020 8530 1244

Residents will have the chance to put their questions to the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and Members of the London Assembly at an event in Woodford next week.

“Topics up for discussion include transport, policing, the environment and London’s economic recovery,” said a spokesperson.

People’s Question Time Redbridge – chaired by Assembly Member Keith Prince  – will take place at the Sir James Hawkey Hall on 2 November from 7pm (free; tickets required; livestream available).

Visit london.gov.uk/pqt

Woodford Arts Group has been without a place to call home since Packfords Hotel closed last autumn. Here, group founder Julia Brett appeals to the community for help in their ongoing search for local exhibition space 

Like the proverbial orphans, Woodford Arts Group is looking for a home again. Since the demise of Packfords Hotel, who gave us great support, we have found ourselves searching for suitable venues to hold our local exhibitions. So, this is an appeal to anybody who thinks they might be able to help us.

The Stow Brothers on George Lane have been a great help to our group and we had a small exhibition of our work on show in their office over the summer. They are very community-minded and that’s just what we’re searching for now. 

Woodford Arts Group was started as there was no local focus for artists. The Woodford Arts Trail was well meant, but biannual, and didn’t feature artists that well. Recently, a Redbridge Arts Trail was mooted, but it soon became apparent this is very much Ilford-based and that’s where any funding and exhibition space would be directed, a common complaint for us ‘orphan’ wards on the periphery of the borough. Vision RCL have so far been little or no help, and it’s a morass of box-ticking, demanding we must be an incorporated body.

So, an appeal was put out to our local councillors and Ian Duncan Smith MP. We suggested the very underused Sir James Hawkey Hall foyer could be utilised by us and other residents. A good idea that even a former Redbridge mayor agreed with when he opened our first exhibition at Packfords in 2019. Duncan Smith replied and agreed, so he followed it up and was referred back to, yes, you’ve guessed it, Vision RCL, who have not replied, yet again.

Beyond that, what is next? We have been very active trying to find spaces that allow us to use them in our unique way. We are an easel exhibition, which means we do not affect the fabric of any space and we have our own stands to hang work. We steward each exhibition and the artists love to meet the public. As a group, pre-COVID, we wanted to start offering some art sessions locally en plein air and hope to get that in operation sometime soon.

So, what have we tried? We’ve tried church halls, but they have so many community events on, they can’t accommodate us for more than an afternoon. Local restaurants and pubs can’t help us, even when we’ve offered to pay to hire the rooms. They get so much more money for a wedding or birthday party, so we can’t argue with that.

We try to keep to Woodford, but we may have to become WAGs on tour to show our work! It’s a shame because our unique selling point is local artists wanting to exhibit to local people. So, can you help to keep us local? Do you have a space where we could hold a pop-up exhibition? Do get in touch with any ideas.

For more information on Woodford Arts Group, visit swvg.co.uk/wag

Redbridge Museum will open a new permanent exhibition later this year exploring 200,000 years of local history. In the fourth of a series of articles, Museum Officer Nishat Alam looks at some of the items on show

Barnardo’s is the largest children’s charity in the UK. It’s named after Dr Thomas Barnardo who, in 1866, began to open schools and homes to take care of orphans and children, then referred to as ‘destitute waifs’. In 1876, he opened the Village Home for Girls in Barkingside, where the headquarters of the charity are still based. In this article, I look at a similar home the charity set up for boys in Woodford Bridge, in a village named the ‘Garden City’, and the problems around Victorian philanthropy. 

In 1910, Barnardo’s opened the Garden City for Boys at Gwynne House in Woodford Bridge, a large 18th-century house with 39 acres of land. The open green spaces and fresh air of the Woodford countryside would have been thought of as a refreshing change for the 300 boys who had been moved from Barnardo’s homes in London’s cramped East End.

Like the Village Home in Barkingside, the Garden City provided everything its residents could need: houses where they lived in ‘family groups’ with a house mother, a hospital, church and farmland, to name a few. The boys attended school and learned skills that would one day allow them to pick up a trade, like baking, tailoring and gardening. The Garden City was open to boys up to the age of 15; some came in as much younger children and stayed for much of their childhoods and others only for a while.

The Garden City was built only a few years after the death of Dr Barnardo, but it echoed the methods with which he’d started his charity. Barnardo was a rich and religious philanthropist at a time when it was widely agreed that people like him were best positioned to improve the lives of the poor. But his work was criticised even during his lifetime. Though many young residents of homes like Garden City were orphans, others still had living parents who they had been removed from if Barnardo felt their homes were abusive or too poor. It was a typical attitude of the Victorian middle and upper classes that is no longer as widely held today.

In fact, as the thinking around children in care changed, the demand for homes like Barnardo’s waned. From the 1970s, the land that made up Garden City was slowly sold off. Much of it became private housing and Gwynne House, where the boys’ home had first opened, was redeveloped as The Prince Regent Hotel.

The new Redbridge Museum, opening in the next few months, will explore the borough’s historic institutions, like Barnardo’s homes. On display will be objects and other material from our collections, such as the postcard above showing a photograph of some of the boys of Woodford’s Garden City.

Redbridge Museum is located on Clements Road, Ilford. Visit swvg.co.uk/rm
To complete a survey on what else should go on display, visit swvg.co.uk/rms

The park-and-stride scheme at Churchfields Junior School was implemented a year ago. Here Councillor Rosa Gomez (Churchfields ward, Labour) reflects on the improvements it has made to road safety

As a local councillor, I have many responsibilities, but one issue particularly close to my heart is the safety and general well-being of children. This takes many forms, including campaigning to improve the quality of the air we breathe and striving for better road safety.

Children under the age of 16 are the most vulnerable group of pedestrians on our roads, with the most dangerous time being after school. And after a long period of decline nationally, the number of those who are tragically killed or seriously injured has started to increase again in recent years. This worries me.

As a governor at Churchfields Junior School, I have campaigned with parents and staff for measures to help protect children as they arrive and leave school. As was the norm at many schools, it was common to see – and smell – idling cars lined up close to the school gates and parents doing U-turns even as children were crossing the road or cycling past. I know of several incidents where vehicles struck children, and how many near misses have there been? It seemed only a matter of time before there was a serious injury or fatality.   

Churchfields is an excellent school and I’m pleased so many children walk, cycle or scoot to and from their lessons. But there will always be occasions when children need to be dropped off or picked up. That is why I was so pleased to see the park-and-stride scheme initiated a year ago, which allows parents and carers to use the Derby Road car park free of charge at drop-off and pick-up times. Redbridge Council’s Highways Department were extremely helpful in getting this scheme established and head teacher Rebecca Emeny and her staff have done a great job of advertising it within the school. The walk from Derby Road to the school takes just five minutes and gives children that little bit of extra exercise. It also reduces the vehicle pressure on Churchfields at the busiest times of the day. Air pollution and traffic chaos are reduced.

Additional measures outside the school have included extensions to the no-parking zigzag lines and signage requesting no idling and no U-turns. I know these bad practices still take place, but not to the extent they did previously. And I look forward to CCTV outside the school to act as a deterrent.

The Churchfields campaign has been a marvellous example of what can be achieved with parents, teaching staff and council officers working together. And I’m proud to have played my part, too. There’s still more to do, though. I would love to see a greater take-up of the park-and-stride scheme and look forward to a time when there is a traffic-free ‘school street’ outside all our primary schools.

To contact Councillor Rosa Gomez, call 07799 057 030

This year’s Wanstead Festival will now take place on Sunday 2 October.

The annual event was originally planned to take place on Sunday 18 September, the day before Her Majesty’s state funeral.

“Taking place at Christchurch Green, from 11am-6pm, the rescheduled festival promises a mix of music and performances across two main stages, and lots of family friendly attractions,” said a Vision RCL spokesperson.

Residents are invited to join a vigil on Christ Church Green in Wanstead this evening (12 September) in memory of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

“Please join us tonight in Wanstead as we honour the memory of Her Majesty The Queen and reflect upon the lasting impact she made on our world,” said the Leader of Redbridge Council, Councillor Jas Athwal.

The event will start at 6pm, with those attending asked to gather near the new café on the green.

South Woodford resident Matt Bradley explains how, earlier this year, he helped students in Ukraine escape the war-torn country by creating a cryptocurrency guide

My name is Matt Bradley. I’m a recent graduate from a London university and have lived in South Woodford for most of my life. My degree was focused on business management and I took a particular interest in emerging technologies and companies operating on the blockchain (a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets).

While studying at university, I got a call from a friend who knew I had been working on some blockchain-based projects, asking if I could give some advice to a charity group helping minority students in Ukraine.

I took the call at 10pm and met Natasha Junejo, who was working with Black Foreigners in Ukraine (BFU). They explained the issues that minority students were facing when trying to use the local currency to pay for transport out of the country. Many forms of transport were accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment; however, the group had no experience with this technology.

So, I started making a guide that could be deployed to students on the ground and the organisation’s team members. Knowing that time could make a big impact on the individuals in Ukraine, I set to work, and I knew creating a pictorial guide would be extremely useful as many students didn’t have Ukrainian as their first language.

The guide was used to install a wallet on their smartphones that would give them an address that BFU was then able to send cryptocurrency to and the students could then use their phones to pay for goods and services.

Within 12 hours we had a young medical student who had been lost for almost a day using cryptocurrency to get themselves on a train out of the country and en route to their family. The team at BFU and Natasha did all the heavy lifting, and the work they do is truly astounding.

It was amazing to help in any way and I’ll always remember this opportunity as a time I was able to make a difference, and it makes a great case for decentralised currencies.

The blockchain isn’t just a way to invest money and buy ‘internet money’. It offers a way for people to live without relying on institutions to transact and work as a community. By taking that institutional power away and putting it in the hands of us, the people, we can make big impacts together.

I’m now working with London Imaginative Collective to build a way to tell the stories of refugees and those in Ukraine using the blockchain, and we will soon be releasing a documentary covering the untold stories of the Ukrainian people.