The Amwell Street Fig

This fig may have been planted as a teaching aid. It sprawls across the front of the former Clerkenwell Parochial Schools on Amwell Street, several stems rising from one rootstock and propped where the limbs have outgrown their own strength. Paul Wood, who has spent years cataloguing London's street trees, reckons it has stood here since the schools opened, put in deliberately at the front of the building and perhaps partly so that Bible lessons had something living to point at. Figs run all through scripture, and a fig outside the classroom window is an illustration nobody can lose. The dates want care. The Amwell Society dates the school building to 1830, while other accounts say 1827. And the planting claim rests on that one specialist reading rather than on two independent records, so roughly 195 years is a careful estimate, not a birth certificate. Clerkenwell changed around it more than most of London did: watchmakers, radical printers, the New River head a few streets north still delivering water into the city, charity schoolchildren giving way to board schools and then to flats. The building stopped being a school. The fig stayed, and Islington still counts it among the borough's notable street trees. It is a working fruit tree on a public pavement in central London, which is the part that stops people. Come in late summer and the figs are there, at eye level, on the street.