There are a lot of people who live in Waltham Forest. 218341 people admitted to their presence in the Borough in the 2001 census. The Council, doesn't actually say on its website what they now think the population is, though they did put up some posters in 2007 saying there were 220,000 people in the borough. All making one community. The population density in the High Street area is said to be 50 people per hectare.

However, the planning and building control department are seriously under-staffed and have been thoughtfully provided with offices miles away to the North in Chingford. They don't do much enforcement. Most streets have had skips parked in them in the last months as the terraced houses in the south of the Borough are converted into smaller flats. Local politicians estimate a 10% turnover in house occupancy every year. Recent discussions in the Council on planning issues relating to flat conversions have dissolved into farces.

50 people per hectare is likely to be an underestimate if the increasing sound of Polish, Lithuanian and Russian in the NHS, on the buses and in the market is anything to go on. I was recently told by a man whose guess is a good as anybody's becasue he sells them coffee, that there could now be up to 2000 Bulgarians in Walthamstow and at least 10,000 East Europeans have arrived in the last year.

As they do not register to vote, the council has no idea how many Poles there are, but anyone reading the advertising cards in shop windows will tell you there are a lot of them.  So will my next door neighbour, who really is the proverbial Polish builder. He and his partner have just had a baby. Others are a couple of years ahead of them where having children is concerned, creating a surge in demand at our local schools.

My Polish friends' one bedroomed flat is not however overcrowded compared with the two bedroomed flat upstairs which has four, possibly five Ukranians or Belarussians living in it. Seven or eight people living in a house originally build for about 4. The figures are similar on the other side of my house - where we think four Poles live downstairs and two couples upstairs, including some Portuguese speakers.