Hundreds of thousands of years ago woolly mammoths, rhinos and lions roamed Redbridge. Reporter DANIEL BINNS digs deeper to find out more...

In the period known as “prehistory”, what is now east London was a desolate wasteland populated by a wide variety of beasts.

Our knowledge of this era is based on the fossils left behind by the former residents, many of which would not look out of place on the plains of Africa today.

Mostly famously is the so-called 'Ilford Mammoth' which was discovered around 150 years ago and remains the only complete skull of the creature to be found in Great Britain.

But other discoveries included the remains of elephants, giant deer, grizzly bears and three types of rhino.

Pinning down when they lived in the Redbridge region is tricky, but the Natural History Museum dates the existence of woolly mammoths in Britain to around 200,000 years ago.

That timespan was during the Pleistocene era, which was marked by a series of ice ages interspersed with periods of warmer weather and dry conditions.

Most of the finds in Redbridge are credited to civil servant Sir Antonio Brady, who lived from 1811 to 1881.

He spent a large amount of his spare time and money enthusiastically amassing a haul of specimens from Ilford, starting in the 1840s.

However less attention is given to a woman called Mary Curtis, who was married to the owner of a quarry in Uphall Road, Ilford.

Her role was crucial as she would write to the keen palaeontologist every time unusual bones were discovered at the site, and he would rush down to carefully extract them from the pit.

Thankfully much of his collection still survive today due to his decision to sell his fossils to the British Museum in 1874 for the princely sum of £525.

Contemporary records show the collection additionally included fossils of a fox, 32 bison, and 34 horses. Hippo bones are also mentioned but it was later felt that the fossil had been erroneously mis-labelled.

Today the impressive Ilford Mammoth skull and tusks sit in the Natural History Museum, while Sir Antonio's legacy lives on in museums and books, and with a plaque at Ilford Methodist Church in Ilford Lane.