The Embankment Plane

The tree that helped make London a city of planes is not a London Plane. It is an Oriental Plane, one of the two species crossed to produce the hybrid now growing down half the streets in the capital, and it stands where Horse Guards Avenue meets the Victoria Embankment, on ground that was river water until Bazalgette's engineers pushed the Thames back in the 1860s. The Great Trees of London map dates it to 1870 and gives the species. Both of those rest on that one specialist record. General histories of the Embankment agree that planes went in along the new road from about 1870, the first scheme in the city to plant a thoroughfare with trees systematically, but none of them names this individual tree. So it is a survivor of that first planting on the evidence available, rather than a documented one. It has had a good view. Cleopatra's Needle was raised a few hundred metres along the same Embankment in 1878, trams came and went, the Ministry of Defence rose behind it in the 1950s, and Whitehall traffic has run past its trunk for a century and a half. It gets called one of the tallest planes in Britain, a claim nobody appears to have checked. Easier to say what it plainly is: a very large tree on one of the busiest corners in Westminster that almost nobody stops for.