Epping Forest has been continuously wooded since Neolithic times. Pollen profiles taken from peat bogs in and around the forest show that even the Iron Age occupation - whose embankments survive at Loughton Camp and Ambresbury Banks, both visible if you know where to look - had no significant effect on the forest cover. The species mix has shifted over the millennia. Once this was small-leaved lime, a tree now scarce in Britain. The selective cutting of trees during the Anglo-Saxon period gradually changed the canopy to the beech-birch and oak-hornbeam dominance you see today. Henry II is thought to have given the area legal status as a royal forest in the twelfth century, then part of the much larger Forest of Essex which covered almost the whole county. 'Forest' was a legal term: it meant only the king could hunt deer there. It did not necessarily mean the land was wooded.

By 1870 the unenclosed forest had shrunk to 3,500 acres. One landowner, Reverend John Whitaker Maitland, had enclosed 1,100 acres in his manor of Loughton. A local commoner called Thomas Willingale insisted on his ancient right to lop trees in the forest for firewood, despite increasing pressure on him to stop. The dispute became a test case. The Lord Warden, William Long-Wellesley, had been letting enclosures slip through. The Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues had been selling off freeholds. The London public, alarmed by what had happened to Hainault Forest, was watching closely. The City of London Corporation - which had legal standing through ownership of commoners' grazing rights in the southern part of the forest - took up the legal fight. After years of litigation the courts upheld the commoners' rights, the Corporation bought up the contested land, and Parliament passed the Epping Forest Act of 1878. The forest was saved. It was the first major success of the environmental movement in Europe. The Corporation still owns and manages it today.

Epping Forest contains 55,000 ancient trees, more than any other single site in the United Kingdom. Many of them are pollards - trees that were cut back to a permanent base, the bolling, every thirteen years or so, just above the height where deer and cattle could browse the new shoots. That pollarding stopped when the Epping Forest Act passed in 1878. For 150 years since, the pollarded trees have grown unchecked, building enormous crowns of thick branches as big as ordinary tree trunks, balanced on the squat ancient bases. The weight is often more than the parent tree can hold. The forest is full of fallen branches and standing deadwood, which means it is also one of the richest sites in the country for rare fungi and invertebrates that depend on rotting wood. The Pedunculate oak, European beech, hornbeam, silver birch, and European holly that dominate today are descendants of trees first cut centuries ago.

Epping Forest has been the setting for an unusually wide cast of writers, painters, and musicians. Elizabethan poets George Gascoigne and Thomas Lodge lived in and around it. Lady Mary Wroth, the seventeenth-century poet and prose romancer, lived at Loughton Hall. Ben Jonson was a frequent visitor with George Chapman. In Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year of 1722, the Londoners who try to escape the 1665 plague settle around Epping Forest. Mary Wollstonecraft - the same Mary Wollstonecraft who later wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - spent the first five years of her life growing up here. In 1829 Thomas Hood published The Epping Hunt, satirising the rowdy annual Easter Monday hunt that was for centuries a notorious cockney institution. The sculptor Jacob Epstein lived on the forest's edge at Baldwins Hill in Loughton for twenty-five years, and exhibited a hundred paintings of the forest in 1933.

The forest runs roughly nineteen kilometres north to south, but is never more than four kilometres wide. The main body stretches from Epping in the north to Chingford on the edge of the London built-up area. South of Chingford it narrows to a green corridor that pushes deep into east London, as far as Forest Gate. The southern Wanstead Flats are the southernmost point now, though the forest once extended further to Romford Road. Three visitor centres operate: Epping Forest Visitor Centre at High Beach, Epping Forest Gateway at Chingford, and The Temple in Wanstead Park. London Underground Central line stations between Leytonstone and Epping put millions of people within a short walk of ancient woodland that has stood here continuously since people in the Stone Age first walked through it. The forest absorbs the strain. The challenge of the next century is the same as the one of 1878: balancing the right of millions to use it with the survival of what makes it worth using.