The Planes of Queen Square

Bristol's city council built Queen Square between 1699 and 1720 on reclaimed marshland, selling plots to the city's merchants for grand townhouses around a formal green, one of the largest and earliest Georgian squares in England. The council planted 257 trees there in avenues as early as 1716, but almost none of that original planting survives: the double lines of London Planes that ring the square's edge today were planted later, probably in the 1880s, replacing whatever had come before. The square witnessed real violence in October 1831, when rioters protesting the House of Lords' rejection of electoral reform burned roughly a hundred buildings around its edges, including the Customs House and the Mansion House, in one of the most destructive urban riots in 19th-century Britain; the west side of the square was entirely rebuilt afterward. The planes now ringing the square postdate that fire by half a century, but they have had a century and a half since to grow into the mature canopy that shades the square's paths today, standing over a green that has been rebuilt, replanted and repurposed more than once since 1699.