News

·        Environmental Landfill Tax Fund excludes street trees

We have increasingly found ourselves struggling to find sources of funding with public money, in particular the landfill tax credit system now the Landfill Communities Fund. Historically this had been a major supporter of the work that we do, furthermore several of the DEB's ( distributive environmental body) had expressed interest in working with us on more than one occasion.

In 2005  the criteria under which we applied for funding was changed to disallow the planting of trees in the street. It was decided that the street did not represent a public amenity and therefore any such tree planting would no longer be supported. This seems to run contrary to the idea of  liveability of cities, that is taking these public spaces, streets, and improving them for all who use them.

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Autumn/Winter 2007-8

Last winter phase 2 of the Fitzrovia Urban Forest was completed, this saw 20 new street trees planted north of Oxford St, bringing the total we have planted in the area to more than 50. Species included Maple, Birch and Pear and the project funded with money provided by Derwent London plc.

We have also received funding from Delancey plc and from Rebecca Hossack who raised funds running the New York marathon. We hope to plant approximately 100 new street trees and so far we have planted 18 over 4 different boroughs, these have all been matched planted. We now have proposals to plant the remaining trees in Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth and Newham this winter

More generally there has been a great deal of interest in the numbers of Street trees that we are losing in London. This interest from the media and the general public has increased as the results of an inquiry dubbed 'The Great  Chainsaw  Massacre'  found that, although planting lots of smaller species we are losing our larger species tree stocks.

We welcome the decision  by the Mayor of London to fund the planting of 10,000 new street trees.