I arrived in Epping Forest when I was four and quickly came to love its trees and ponds. I saw Churchill speak in Loughton in 1945. We were taken on fishing expeditions to the Forest Ponds, and I got into my next school by writing an essay on ‘Newts’. When older I regularly walked to look at the two ponds on Strawberry Hill. Later still I brought my children to the Forest. My two sons were baptised in the church in the Forest, Holy Innocents. I am a woodlander through and through with an instinctive love of the Tudor aspects of the Forest when Fairmead was Henry VIII’s deer park.
Nicholas Hagger came to Epping Forest during the war. As a boy he knew Sir William Addison, long recognised as an authority on the Forest, and saw Churchill speak in his village in 1945. He grew up against the background of the Forest. He has lived by Epping Forest since 1982.
In Part One of this book he conveys the history of Epping Forest in the times of the Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, Medievals and Tudors, and enclosers and loppers. In Part Two he shows how history has shaped the Forest places he grew up with: Loughton, Chigwell, Woodford, Buckhurst Hill, Waltham Abbey, High Beach, Upshire, Epping, the Theydons, and Chingford Plain. An Appendix contains some of his poems about these places.
This is a guide to Epping Forest at the end of the First World War, and covers its history, topography (many routes through the Forest), wildlife, and geology of the Forest, with maps. It is fascinating to see what parts of Epping Forest looked like a hundred years ago, and what birds and wildlife could be seen then.
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I visited Addison’s bookshop in Loughton in 1945 on my own, aged 6, and William Addison helped me spend my book token on a book on trees.
This book covers the Forest’s literary and historical associations in 23 chapters that cover the Tudor court, Elizabethan writers and musicians, Donne and Herbert, and Clare and Tennyson, with treatments of the Forest villages, including my own Loughton and Buckhurst Hill.
I recommend this book as I go back to it again and again, and as Addison started my interest in trees in 1945, with this book in typescript on his desk. My most recent book The Tree of Tradition will be out in 2024.
I recommend this book as I have often gone back to it.
It takes us from Chingford Plain to Fairmead Bottom, High Beach, Upshire, Waltham Abbey, Epping, Strawberry Hill, and Connaught Waters, all of which I often visited in my boyhood and youth. There are many lovely pictures, most in black and white and some in colour, and there are good maps.
It gives me pleasure to be reminded of pre-1968 local scenes in the pictures.
This is a massive book, 480 pages packed with pictures of old Forest houses, contrasting past and present views.
It begins with the Forest, deer, and ancient camps and soon devotes 20 or 30 pages to old pictures of each of the Forest villages and places, including Woodford, Buckhurst Hill, Chigwell, Loughton, Chingford, High Beach, Theydon Bois, Abridge, Epping and Waltham Abbey. Press reports from past centuries and the 1980s and quotations from books on Epping Forest can be found on every page to illustrate the pictures.
The historic Epping Forest area of Great Britain is portrayed through "then and now" comparisons, recording the changing scene since the earliest days of photography. From Forest Gate in the south to Epping in the north; from Chigwell and Abridge in the east through Chingford to the great abbey of Waltham in the west, a wide-ranging mixture of contemporary extracts has been blended with more than 1400 photographs, drawings and maps, together with specially-taken aerial photographs, to trace the events and developments which have shaped the locality. The illustrations being combined with a text researched mainly from newspapers, magazine articles…
This book has a Foreword by Lord Murray, who lived near me and I often met.
It covers the area in eight sections, including Buckhurst Hill, Chingford Woods and Fairmead Bottom, Loughton Woods (Strawberry Hill and Loughton Camp), High Beach, and Ambresbury Banks. There are black and white, and coloured, pictures and maps. I used to run into Ken Hoy at events and we sometimes chatted.
This book gives information about over 200 of the Forest’s woods, plains, streams, and tracks.
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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