Woodford appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wdefort, although its earliest recorded use is earlier in 1062 as Wudeford.

The old Saxon road, that followed the valley at this point and utilised this ford, skirted the forest (which was, and is, on the high ground west of the Roding).

The Saxon Road eventually reached north of the Forest and branched East and West at that point.

[4] Woodford was never a single village, rather it was a collection of hamlets, and has retained to some extent its portmanteau nature.

Woodford provided attractive estates for London merchants and retired East India Company officials who built large houses there.

[3] As a consequence, many of the recorded inhabitants would have been servants, and there is even evidence of Africans ('negroes') living in Woodford in the eighteenth century.

In fact the domestic servants and wealthy Londoners may have quickly outnumbered the remnant of the local, original rural folk.

The new convenience of transportation encouraged the growth in number of the daily commuter that is typical of the Woodford resident today.

Woodford soon became the residence of the well-to-do city worker, as attested by John Marius Wilson in his Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, written between 1870 and 1872 In fact Woodford doubled its population in the middle and later decades of the 19th century due to the arrival of the railway.

The practice became increasingly less well suited to the times, as they occasionally penetrated into neighbouring gardens and roads before being driven back onto the forest land.

Their departure, however, meant that grass and saplings grew on the previously well-cropped meadow areas of forest land.

[11] Another writer who lived in Woodford is James Hilton, who wrote the novels Goodbye Mr Chips and Lost Horizon (in which he coined the term Shangri La) in a semi-detached house at 42 Oak Hill Gardens, which however was in Walthamstow borough.

[13] Smith became a vicar and prominent Reformer, but he is now most famous as a great wit of the early nineteenth century.

He was a part of the brilliant intellectual circles of his day, and once said of the historian Macaulay, [He] has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

[13] He compared marriage to a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

[17] The London Overground serves nearby Highams Park station between Liverpool Street and Chingford.

Buses link the area directly to Debden, Wood Green, Ilford, Chingford, Walthamstow and Leyton.

The road forms the Ultra Low Emission Zone boundary for the most polluting light vehicles, which only applies in South Woodford.

[23] The M11 motorway begins in Woodford and bypasses the town to the east en route to Harlow, Stansted Airport and Cambridge.

At Waterworks Corner, a shared-use underpass links Woodford to cycle routes and footpaths southbound towards Leyton.

[24] The Roding Valley Walk is a shared-use path for pedestrians and cyclists which begins in Woodford and continues to Ilford.