1. The Hornsey Town Hall Sycamore
My first Substack post features a great but unregarded north London tree.
Welcome to the The Street Tree! This is my first Substack post, and the first in a series of pithy illustrated posts about great individual trees from Britain and Ireland. I’ll be posting at least one a week over the coming months.
Love of disturbed ground means sycamores do well in towns and cities, to such an extent that they have acquired a reputation for being a weed species. The example outside Hornsey Town Hall in north London shows another side: it is a splendid tree and a Crouch End landmark that is considerably older than the Scandi-modernist building. While large for southeast England, it is not a patch on great Scottish trees like the Beauly Sycamore near Inverness.
Species details
Sycamore
Acer pseudoplatanus
Where to find it
Hornsey Town Hall, The Broadway, London N8 9JJ
///oasis.junior.grin |51.578927, -0.123157
Meta Sycamore
In Scotland, where some of the finest sycamores can be found, they have historically been called ‘planes’. These large-leaved trees are of course members of the maple family, but the latin species name pseudoplatanus equates to ‘like a plane’. A similarity most apparent in the sycamore’s leaves. Conversely, a synonym for London plane is Platanus x acerifolia, where ‘acerifolia’ means ‘maple-like leaves’.
