The Windrush Square Plane

In 1940 a bomb destroyed the Brixton Theatre. The plane tree at the centre of what is now Windrush Square came through the same strike, and since then it has come through something almost as risky for a city tree, two redesigns of the ground around it. The plot has a long paper trail. The plot was Brixton Oval, with the Tate Library built in 1893 and a garden laid out in 1905. In 1965 and 1966 the space was redesigned with the plane kept as its central feature. In the redevelopment of the late 2000s it was paved over once more, and the plane was kept once more. Lambeth Council, which looks after the square, describes it simply as the large mature London plane at its heart. How old it is, nobody has pinned down. A local history piece says it has stood in the centre of Brixton for around a hundred years; a 2025 tree writer calls it Victorian and one of the finest planes in town. Somewhere past a century is as far as the sources go, and no one has published a girth. If you know more, tell us. In 2008 it joined the Great Trees of London, named in a public poll of the city's twenty favourite trees. It stands alone in the middle of a paved square between the library and the Ritzy, free and open at all hours, five minutes from Brixton station.