Our area is blessed with a profusion of superb trees which look particularly good now in their autumnal colours. So before the wind blows all the leaves away, I've been out with my camera to capture a selection of especially good specimens for the Gallery - see here.
If you're interested in street trees, I recommend a superb little book called "London's Street Trees: a field guide to the urban forest" by Paul Wood, who lives in Islington. Paul also has a website where you can order the book, at https://thestreettree.com/, which is also full of fascinating tree information, and he hosts tree walks which are great fun - I've been on a couple.
Another great resource is London Street Trees - an online map showing every individual street tree in London with an identification key! It's an initiative of the Mayor of London and you can find it at https://maps.london.gov.uk/trees/ . OK, it's not 100% accurate and it needs to be brought up to date but I think it's wonderful. Here on the left is a section of the map showing our Cloudesley area. If you're really obsessive you can download the entire database on which the map is based. This allows you to identify those more uncommon trees which are marked "Other" on the map.
Stop Press! Layers of London has added a new "Environment" layer which appears to show the same tree data. But it's better because the trees are actually identified on the map itself. Here's Cloudesley Square. You can also see rivers and underground rivers!
Finally, courtesy of our neighbour John Scholes, shown below is a street map of the upper part of the Cloudesley area which also shows trees - only this one was published in 1879 based on a survey in 1871! Two things are interesting to note. Firstly, although the gardens all have plenty of trees, there are none on the streets - I wonder when they first started planting them? Secondly, notice that Thornhill Road Garden at the junction of Thornhill Road and Richmond Avenue is identified as a nursery - that's maybe where the garden trees came from!
