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Wanstead is an area in East London, England, in the London Borough of Redbridge. It borders South Woodford to the north, Redbridge to the east and Manor Park to the south, with Leytonstone and Walthamstow to the west. It is located 8 miles northeast of Charing Cross.
Historically an ancient parish in the Becontree hundred of Essex, it was granted urban district status in 1894, and formed part of the Municipal Borough of Wanstead and Woodford between 1937 and 1965, when it became part of the London Borough of Redbridge. Wanstead was a key part of the M11 link road protest from 1993 to 1995, which ended with the construction of the A12 that runs through the town.
The area contains a number of open spaces that are part of Epping Forest, including the grasslands of Wanstead Flats and the woodland of Wanstead Park. Wanstead Park was the site of a suspected Roman villa, and later Wanstead Hall, the manor house of Wanstead Manor. The park, with artificial lakes, was formerly part of the estate of a large stately home Wanstead House (1722-1825), built by Richard Child, 1st Earl Tylney.
The place name is probably of Saxon origin and is first recorded in a charter of 1065 as Wenstede. The English Place-Names Society derives the name from the Anglo-Saxon words waenn, meaning a hill or mound, and stede, a place or settlement. According to an alternative explanation, the first element means "wain" or "wagon", but the meaning of the full compound is not clear. A place in Essex, in 1460, has a name spelt as "Waynsted".
In 1707 the astronomer James Pound became rector of Wanstead. In 1717 the Royal Society lent Pound Huygens's 123-foot focal length object-glass, which he set up in Wanstead Park. Pound's observations with it of the five known satellites of Saturn enabled Halley to correct calculations of their movements; and Newton employed, in the third edition of the Principia, his micrometrical measures of Jupiter's disc, of Saturn's disc and ring, and of the elongations of their satellites; and obtained from him data for correcting the places of the comet of 1680. Laplace also used Pound's observations of Jupiter's satellites for the determination of the planet's mass; and Pound himself compiled in 1719 a set of tables for the first satellite, into which he introduced an equation for the transmission of light.
Pound trained his sister's son, James Bradley, and many of their observations were made together, including the opposition of Mars in 1719, and the transit of Mercury on 29 October 1723. Their measurement of γ Virginis in 1718 was the first made of the components of a double star and was directed towards the determination of stellar parallax.
In 1727, Bradley embarked upon a series of observations using a telescope of his own, erected at the rectory in Wanstead, now the site of Wanstead High School. This instrument had the advantage of a large field of view and he was able to obtain precise positions of a large number of stars that transited close to the zenith over the course of about two years. Combined with observations from his friend Samuel Molyneux's house at Kew in Surrey, this established the existence of the phenomenon of aberration of light, and also allowed Bradley to formulate a set of rules that would allow the calculation of the effect on any given star at a specified date.
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