The Cheapside Plane

The only Great Tree of London still standing inside the Square Mile grows out of a churchyard that no longer has a church. St Peter Cheap burned down in the Great Fire of 1666 and was never rebuilt, and the plane tree that replaced its congregation is old enough that nobody can say exactly when it was planted. By 1853 a cab company was advertising its rank simply as 'Under the tree, Cheapside,' proof the tree was already a fixed point on the map before street numbering caught up with London's growth. In 1901 the press went further and called it the most valuable tree in the world, a claim about the land beneath it as much as the tree itself. It has survived since through the Blitz, through the City's total postwar rebuilding, and through a peculiarity of property law: the leases on the buildings flanking it forbid construction above two storeys on that side, an accident of contract law that has kept its canopy open to the sky for longer than most buildings nearby have existed. William Wordsworth is thought to have had this exact tree in mind writing his 1800 poem Poor Susan, in which a countrywoman hears a thrush singing from a tree on Cheapside and briefly mistakes the City for home.