The Finsbury Circus Pagoda Tree

This is the only Japanese pagoda tree in the City of London, on the City of London's own account of its gardens, and a City business paper's tour of Finsbury Circus says the same. The species comes from China and flowers cream in August, when almost nothing else does, which is a useful habit in a garden ringed by offices where lunch happens outdoors. Both sources tie the tree to the garden's original 1815 layout by George Dance the Younger, and neither produces a planting record, so the age here is circumstantial: roughly two centuries, inferred from the design rather than read off a document. Treat it as a range rather than a birthday. It has come through the most disruptive stretch of its life. Finsbury Circus lost most of its surface to Crossrail works for over a decade, then closed in 2023 for the first full renovation of the gardens in more than a hundred years and reopened in May 2025. The gardens are small, 2.2 hectares, so finding it takes a minute. Half a kilometre south, the Cheapside Plane is the only Great Tree of London still standing inside the Square Mile, and Kew's Old Lions include pagoda trees of roughly the same generation in a botanical collection. This one has spent its two hundred years in the middle of the banking district instead.