November 2024

Local photographers have produced a 2025 calendar featuring locations across Epping Forest.

“All profit will go to charities operating within the Forest, including The Swan Sanctuary. Last year, we raised over £3,000; this year, we’re aiming for £5,000!” said Don Taylor, who compiled the calendar.

A Wanstead Park bluebell scene and the Northern Lights, as seen from Wanstead Flats, are among the images.

A4 (£10) and A3 (£12) calendars are available from the Wanstead Park tea hut and City Place on the High Street. 

Redbridge Council will host an online meeting to explain the condition of Broadmead Road Bridge.

“Local people are invited to dial in, to hear about the condition of the bridge following assessments from structural engineers, and to find out the next steps for this crucial local infrastructure,” said a spokesperson.

The event will take place via Microsoft Teams on 18 November from 6pm.

For more information, click here.

Redbridge Council has launched a budget survey to gather views on what matters most to local residents.

“We want to inform you about the difficult decisions we, Redbridge Council, will make when prioritising spending to keep vital services running while balancing a squeezed budget,” said a council spokesperson.

“More than a decade of Government austerity has significantly impacted Redbridge. The Council has lost over 54p for every £1 of government grant funding, resulting in over £150m less to spend on local services every year. Despite the challenges of rising inflation, increasing demand, and reduced government funding, Redbridge Council is innovating to continue delivering with less and protecting the vital services that matter most to local people.”

Responses to the survey questions will help set the budget for services in Redbridge for 2025-26.

The survey is open until 1 December.

Wanstead’s Christmas tree lights will be switched on this month at an event featuring performances by local school choirs and a Christmas show.

“With just days to go before the big day, Santa’s navigation system has broken and sent the North Pole into chaos. Will the elves be able to get Santa back on track?” asked a Vision RCL spokesperson.

Local milkman Steve Hayden’s festive float will also be on display at the event, which will take place on 22 November from 4pm on George Green, opposite Wanstead station.

As the holiday season approaches, a group of passionate volunteer bakers led by Paul Canal and Sarah-Jane Hogg are gearing up to make a difference

Each year, a dedicated team of bakers comes together to create delicious, handcrafted Christmas cakes, sold in support of Haven House Children’s Hospice. This initiative raises vital funds to support children with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions, and the effort embodies the holiday spirit of giving and community.

The charity Christmas cake project has become an annual tradition, bringing together people from all walks of life. Through our combined love of baking and community service, our volunteer bakers produce an array of beautiful cakes that celebrate the season’s flavours. Each cake is sold for a donation, with 100% of proceeds going directly to Haven House Children’s Hospice, an organisation dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for children and young people.

Haven House Children’s Hospice provides a compassionate and caring environment for children with complex health needs and life-limiting conditions. The Woodford Green hospice offers an array of services, including respite care, music therapy, hydrotherapy and family support. These services play an essential role in the lives of the children and families they serve, helping to create positive memories and relieve the strain of daily challenges.

For Haven House, community support is crucial. As a charity, the hospice relies heavily on donations and volunteer work to sustain its mission. By purchasing or baking one of these Christmas cakes, you’ll be directly helping to fund these services, making a tangible difference for families facing unimaginable challenges.

This year, we’re calling on community members to get involved. If you have a passion for baking or simply want to contribute to a worthy cause, consider joining our team of volunteer bakers. Whether you’re an experienced baker or a beginner with a love for Christmas treats, your time and effort can have a significant impact. Baking sessions are a wonderful way to meet like-minded people, share recipes and enjoy the holiday spirit, all while helping a remarkable cause.

If baking isn’t your thing, you can still make a difference by purchasing one of these delicious cakes. Each cake is a unique creation, lovingly baked, and they make a wonderful holiday gift or festive addition to your own table. By purchasing a cake, you’re not just bringing joy to your family and friends; you’re also supporting essential care for children in need.

Together, we can bake a difference for Haven House Children’s Hospice. Your support will bring hope and joy to children and families this holiday season, a true reflection of what this time of year is all about.

Let’s make this year’s Wanstead and Woodford Christmas Bakers Appeal our best yet!

To become a volunteer baker or to purchase a cake, text 07769 159433, email havenhousebakers@gmail.com or visit wnstd.com/bakers

Jo Cullen from local solicitors Edwards Duthie Shamash explores employee rights in a redundancy situation, when you need to protect yourself from unfair treatment, discrimination and victimisation 

A redundancy process can be stressful and difficult. If you are an employee about to be consulted, or you are in the process of being consulted about a potential redundancy, it is important you know your rights. 

You have the right not to be unfairly dismissed. In a redundancy situation, this means you should be warned and consulted about the proposed redundancy. Your employer must adopt a fair basis on which to select for redundancy. An employer must identify an appropriate pool from which to select potentially redundant employees and must select against proper criteria.

Currently, the right not to be unfairly dismissed only applies to employees who have been employed continuously for two years or more at the termination date. 

You have rights from day one of employment not to be dismissed for an automatically unfair reason (for example, because you have raised a whistle-blowing concern, a health and safety reason or for asserting a statutory right) or where your redundancy is due to discrimination due to any of the protected characteristics (sex, maternity or pregnancy, marital status or civil partnership, age, race, disability, sexual orientation, gender reassignment or religion or belief), victimisation or harassment or for less favourable treatment due to your fixed-term or part-time status.

If redundancy is confirmed, and you have been employed for two years or more, you have the right to take reasonable paid time off to look for other work or to arrange training. You will be entitled to your contractual notice subject to statutory minimum notice. You may be asked to work your notice, or you may be asked to go on ‘garden leave’ if your contract allows for the notice period. Alternatively, your contract may allow your employer to give you notice immediately and to pay you in lieu of your notice period.

If you have been employed for two years or more, you will have the right to receive a statutory redundancy payment calculated according to a formula based on your age, length of service (capped at 20 years) and a week’s pay (subject to a statutory limit currently £700 as of April 2024). If you unreasonably refuse an offer of suitable alternative employment, you may forfeit your right to a statutory redundancy payment.

An employment lawyer can guide employees through the redundancy process and you may wish to seek independent legal advice to ensure you are aware of your rights and any time limits to make a claim for unfair dismissal, discrimination or victimisation.

Edwards Duthie Shamash is located at 149 High Street, Wanstead, E11 2RL. For more information, call 020 8514 9000 or visit edwardsduthieshamash.co.uk

Benjamin Murphy, Chair of the Epping Forest and Commons Committee, has published an update on work taking place in Wanstead Park. In the first of a series of extracts, the focus is on the Ornamental Water

As part of the Epping Forest and Commons Committee‘s regular cycle of visits to Wanstead Park, we walked the full length of Ornamental Water. With this waterbody completely dry (excluding some recent rainfall) and full of so much vegetation, I do understand the frustrations of those who have written to me asking that we take this seriously.

I can honestly say we do and we are trying everything we can to improve the water resilience of Wanstead Park. However, I have always been transparent in saying the odds are stacked against us with Ornamental Water. The Environment Agency has warned the Mayor of London that within 25 years, London could run out of water. We have a responsibility to ensure the solutions we seek for these man-made waterbodies are sustainable, or to consider alternative options in the best interests of the environment.

So, what specific actions are we taking? Epping Forest currently has an abstraction licence in place to pump 236,520 cubic metres of potable aquifer water each year up until 2028. This is pumped directly into the Heronry Pond and filters down through the cascade. Future abstraction licences are not likely to be permitted and, as such, this is not a long-term, sustainable operation. Therefore, the reinstatement and extension of an ‘up cascade’ scheme needs to be developed. We have engaged expert consultants Spaflow to design a new pump house and new pumps to extract water from the River Roding. Our consultants have engaged extensively with the Environment Agency to ensure all of their proposals meet the extraordinarily tight criteria we have to operate within. This phase of the project has £150,000 allocated from the City of London Corporation.

The proposed new pump house will include filters and pumps which prevent fish being drawn into and harmed by the pumps. We have now submitted detailed proposals to the Environment Agency. However, it may take up to 12 months to consider this application. It is our ambition to begin pumping from winter 2025. However, this is completely reliant on all of the required legal and regulatory permissions, as well as the completed procurement and maintenance contracts, being in place. And one of the outstanding concerns is the quality of water in the River Roding at the moment. So, we are also working with Thames Water and Redbridge Council to address unlicensed discharges of waste into the river.

In a strange twist of fate, there is an unintended benefit to Ornamental Water being dry, as it enables contractors to undertake restoration work to the Grotto. I am also aware there is a sense of irony that the usual water safety signs ask visitors not to swim or bathe in the (non-existent) water! All I ask is for you to please bear with us.

To read Benjamin’s article in full, visit wnstd.com/parkupdate

Tin in a Bin will host a drag queen bingo night in Wanstead on 23 November to raise funds for Redbridge Foodbank’s warehouse renovation project. James Nunn reports on the charity’s recent work 

Since our last article in June, where we outlined Redbridge Foodbank’s warehouse renovation project, we have progressed at pace. Our dedicated team have battled the summer heat and overcome challenges with material delivery, water ingression and timelines – they have our everlasting gratitude, as do the community members who enable the project itself by donating and supporting it. Everything Redbridge Foodbank is able to do for local people in need is facilitated by its generous donors.

Over the past four months, renovations have been completed on the flooring and installation of the volunteer bathrooms and kitchen has begun. As I write, we are awaiting delivery of a new ventilation unit.

Once completed, the warehouse space will enable the streamlining of the current operational model, cut running costs, increase storage capacity, provide a safe working environment for volunteers and allow for the reintroduction of the Redbridge Foodbank Cafe, where clients can enjoy a cup of tea while they speak with our trained volunteers, who can signpost them to expert local organisations that can address the underlying issue leading to them needing our services.

This renovation project has been funded through a mixture of grants, local appeal funding and unrestricted funds. With phase two coming to a close, we are currently fundraising for our final phase, which will operationalise the space to realise the objectives of Redbridge Foodbank: “To relieve hunger and poverty in our local community by feeding people in crisis, promote social inclusion, advance education, training and retraining among unemployed people and develop the capacity and skills of members of the community so they are equipped to identify and meet their own needs.”

Redbridge Foodbank has a proven track record of delivering for our shared local community. A total of 16,771 food parcels were distributed to clients in the last financial year. This breaks down to 10,138 adults and 6,633 children (including repeat visits). And our successful programme with Citizens Advice Redbridge (which began two years ago) has facilitated 1,137 consultations with clients. As a result of these consultations and follow up work, 716 clients have been empowered to support themselves without needing the food bank to survive.

If you would like to help Redbridge Foodbank, whether by volunteering, donating food and hygiene products or donating financially, your gifts will be gratefully received.

A drag queen bingo night organised by Tin in a Bin will take place at Christ Church hall, Wanstead on 23 November from 7pm (tickets: £15). Visit wnstd.com/bingo

To donate to Redbridge Foodbank, visit redbridgefoodbank.org.uk

In the 13th of a series of articles featuring wildlife images from Wanstead Park and Wanstead Flats, Dr Tony Madgwick presents a shot of a Migrant Spreadwing damselfly, a species not previously seen in the area

As we move deeper into autumn, we see fewer damselflies and dragonflies around our local ponds and lakes. So, it was exciting to get a WhatsApp message and an image posted by Andy Gibbons (Wanstead Birders) last month saying he had found what he thought was an Emerald Damselfly, which has not been recorded on Wanstead Flats or in Wanstead Park since 1897, and in East London since the early 2000s.

The message had two of us from the Wren Wildlife Group rushing out to confirm the sighting. And this damselfly turned out to be even more exciting than we first thought, as we confirmed our suspicion that it was a Migrant Spreadwing (or Southern Emerald Damselfly). A further search of the pond area revealed the presence of another female and a male. 

The Migrant Spreadwing is, as its name suggests, something of a wanderer. Common in parts of continental Europe, it was first recorded in Norfolk in 2002 and has since established a few isolated breeding colonies in the south-east of England, working its way up along the Thames in South Essex and North Kent. Finding these three leads us to hope they have begun to establish a new colony, the first in London. 

Damselflies are the dainty relatives of the more familiar and robust aeronauts that are dragonflies. Dragonflies and damselflies are predators, both in the air as adults and underwater as larvae. As larvae, they can live from a few months to five years, depending on species, habitat and weather conditions. Assuming adequate food, the main factor driving growth of individual species is temperature, with warmer climates favouring faster growth. 

In the UK, the Emerald group of mainly green-coloured damsels numbers four different species. All of these have now been recorded in the Wanstead Flats area within the last 125 years or so. However, the Emerald Damselfly and the Scarce Emerald Damselfly have declined rapidly and can no longer be found locally, except as occasional wanderers. The Willow Emerald Damselfly arrived in the UK from continental Europe in 2009 and is now one of the more locally abundant late-summer and early-autumn damselflies. Perhaps we can hope to add the Migrant Spreadwing to our local open spaces. 

The reasons for the demise of some species and the success of others are complex, but human activity and climate change are both important factors. Where we can create and manage diverse mosaics of good quality habitat, we can hope to make existing and future assemblages of animals and plants resilient for future generations to enjoy.

For more information on the Wren Wildlife Group, visit wnstd.com/wren

A local community gardening group won Best Community Display in this year’s Redbridge in Bloom competition.

Comprising members of the Aldersbrook Horticultural Society and the Aldersbrook Medical Centre Patient Participation Group, the gardeners received the award for their work on the medical centre’s garden, and were presented with a trophy at a ceremony at Valentines Mansion.

“The Aldersbrook Medical Centre garden has been transformed and is a welcoming front door to the practice,” said Jane Batey.

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

The first will take place on 9 November at the Woodford War Memorial, outside St Mary’s Church in South Woodford (arrive by 8.40am). This will be followed by a gathering at the Wanstead War Memorial on the High Street on 10 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).

Wanstead’s first-ever repair café took place last month, attracting more than 100 visitors who were able to register items to be fixed for free, including electrical appliances, jewellery, bicycles and clothes.

The event managed to save 1,320kg of carbon emissions and 159kg of waste… Subject to funding, we are hoping to run more repair cafés in 2025, so get in touch if you’d like to help out,” said Lydia Fraser-Ward, who organised the event alongside Wanstead Climate Action and Christ Church.

Email wansteadrepaircafe@gmail.com