Chapel End, Waltham Forest
A densely populated part of north Walthamstow with a wide variety of ethnic minorities, including Asian, Turkish and Greek communities
Former tramway offices in Chapel End
Established in 1303 as the manor of Walthamstow Sarum, its present name came into use after the late 1430s, when Sir William Tyrwhitt founded a chapel here, which adjoined his manor house of Salisbury Hall and was dedicated to Edward the Confessor. The chapel was in ruins by 1650 and attempts to rebuild it foundered.
As the hamlet of Chapel End grew, a new chapel of ease was built by Lewis Vulliamy in 1830 and dedicated to St John. This was replaced by the present church, which was built in 1926 in response to the suburban development of the area, much of which was the work of the Warner family, Walthamstow’s pre-eminent builders.
With the arrival of the North Circular Road in the late 1920s, factories were built in the north of the district, and this industrial zone continued to grow until the 1960s. Sports grounds occupy much of the east side of Chingford Road, together with Sir George Monoux College, formerly a grammar school and now a sixth form college. Lloyd Park is situated to the south-west.
Most homes in Chapel End are owner-occupied and a high proportion of these contain dependent children. At Chapel End Junior School, 56 per cent of children come from ethnic minorities and a quarter do not speak English as their first language.
The author James Hilton partly modelled the protagonist of his novel Goodbye Mr Chips
