The Great Plane of Brunswick Square

This plane was planted for orphans. Brunswick Square Gardens was laid out in 1796 as green space for the children of the Foundling Hospital, and this tree is reckoned to date from that laying out, which makes it around 230 years old. Only the planes of Berkeley Square, put in seven years earlier, are commonly held to be older among the planes of central London. It has stood through everything Bloomsbury became: the Hospital selling up and moving out of London in the 1920s, its buildings coming down, the square rebuilt around the gap, the Blitz, and the concrete decks of the Brunswick Centre arriving to the west in the 1970s. The institution it was planted to shade is gone. The tree is not. In 2008 it was named one of the ten Great Trees of London, and it has since been given its own information board in the square, which is a quiet way of saying the neighbourhood knows what it has. Photographs taken in spring 2026 show it in full health. Neither source that agrees on the 1796 planting records a girth or a height, so there are no measurements to quote here, only the thing itself: a very large plane in a small square five minutes from Russell Square station, free and open, with the Foundling Museum on the far side telling the rest of the story.