Wanstead Friends Meeting House. Photo: Photo: John Dash.
Two worlds
Emily Ranken tells of an idyll in a bustling city
Epping Forest, on the outskirts of London, covers a substantial area of land, but much of it has been destroyed since the city was built over a thousand years ago. It is the last standing part of the ancient forest that once covered the whole of the London area, the remains of which are now unfortunately cut through with busy roads. It is where we go for family walks, eat breakfast on Christmas Day, and where I first learned to identify the age of a tree by how many rings there are in the trunk. It is a peaceful area of green natural beauty – unusual so close to such a large city.
Wanstead Meeting is just on the outside of part of the woodland, in what seems to be a bubble of serenity captured from the forest. If it were not for the busy road directly in front of it, it would seem like it was part of the countryside, as the Wanstead Flats (a large area of wild grass) are opposite the Meeting.
Walking inside, you are enveloped by the peaceful atmosphere of the building. The hexagonal Meeting room is always a cool place to be in the summer and is a place to escape from the stress of the week. The ceiling has three blobs of blu-tack in the middle, which have six lines coming out from them to the corners of the room. When I was younger, I always used to imagine the ceiling as a spider (but with six legs, and a blu-tack face) looking down on Meeting for Worship.
Looking outside the windows of the Meeting room, you can see the garden (we never called it a graveyard), with rows of gravestones. Once, at a children’s Meeting in the garden (we are lucky enough to have quite a large number of children at Wanstead – I would guess at about nine to fourteen in total), we discovered a crumbling gravestone tucked away at the back with ‘Elizabeth Fry’ written on it, and some dates. On asking my father if he knew there was a famous Quaker buried at our Meeting, he said that she probably wasn’t actually buried there, but simply had a headstone with her name on it. At the end of the garden is a tiny area of woodland – a remnant of Epping Forest – where, at the end of Meeting, we would go and play, climb trees, or pick flowers. In a small clearing that takes up about half of the space of this area, there is the annual Meeting house bonfire in November.
A few metres down the road, however, it is a different story. Here, the green peace of the Meeting and the forest gives way to the grey urban bustle of Wanstead and Leytonstone, with Primark, Matalan and other high street stores attracting shoppers, and it is a very different atmosphere altogether.
I suppose it just goes to show that two totally different environments can exist side by side, with people who are involved in both worlds. This is the way I have always thought of Wanstead Meeting – as a place where I always would go as a young child on a Sunday (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) to enjoy a spot, which manages to capture the peace of Epping Forest, while still being part of the busy city in which we live today.
