Gold leaf... the £1.6million tree
Church marvel is most valuable specimen in UK
A PLANE tree in a churchyard has been crowned Britain’s most valuable tree – priced at an astonishing £1.6million.
The majestic 300-year-old specimen at St Mary Magdalene Church in Islington, north London, is worth seven times more than the average UK house.
The London plane, which has a circumference of 13ft, was valued under a system that puts a ‘price’ on trees in a bid to halt the ‘chainsaw massacre’ of urban areas across the country.
The Daily Mail’s Be A Tree Angel campaign, organised with the Tree Council, is encouraging readers to plant trees to help make a greener Britain – and protect existing trees.
The newspaper is giving away trees all week for readers to plant in their gardens and communities.
The £1.3million figure is based on a system known as CAVAT – Capital Asset Valuation of Amenity Trees – used by councils and recognised by the courts to protect trees at risk from being cut down.
The system means cutting a mature tree down could be an expensive problem for any property owner thinking of doing so, as the courts can order them to pay the CAVAT value in full.
After the system was launched in 2008, a Victorian plane in Berkeley Square was valued at £750,000.
Since then, many more historic trees nationwide have been officially valued to protect them from developers and councils concerned about health and safety, as well as insurance claims.
Two giant London planes planted in around 1850, next to what is now the bus station in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, are worth around £1million.
A plane next to St Paul’s Cathedral is worth £585,000, while another, on Cheapside in London, which survived a direct hit by a bomb during the Second World War, is worth £350,000.
A 90-year-old London plane in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens is also among the most valuable trees in Scotland at £200,000.
The valuations emerged during National Tree Week, the UK’s largest annual tree celebration.
Nationally, councils have been chopping down street trees at the rate of about 60 a day, according to figures revealed through freedom of information laws.
Environmental groups say that councils are stripping the nation’s leafy suburbs of their Victorian and Edwardian heritage to save the cost of managing trees.
Property developers and big infrastructure projects such as the HS2 railway are also facing criticism for felling mature trees in their way. When they are replaced, it is with saplings, which are far cheaper to maintain.
In London, 49,000 trees were officially recorded as being removed by council officers in the five years to 2017. In south-west London, Wandsworth Council spent £83,000 of public money to fell a magnificent 140-year-old stretch of horse chestnut trees on health and safety grounds.
The council insisted on removing the entire avenue of 51 trees on Tooting Common’s Chestnut
Avenue despite a petition signed by more than 6,500 people and the opposition of London mayor Sadiq Khan, who is a local resident. The authority claimed that the trees were in poor condition and posed a ‘serious threat’ but an independent tree risk assessor concluded that most of the trees, valued at £2.6million under
CAVAT, were perfectly safe. Similarly, despite massive public protests, Sheffield Council has cut down 5,600 of the city’s 36,000 street trees over the past seven years and plans to remove another 12,000. While Birmingham’s historic Centenary Square’s oldest tree, which is at least 90 years old, was also chopped down in 2017 – one of 9,200 trees felled in the city over seven years.
The CAVAT system was devised by arboriculturist Christopher Neilan after he became concerned about the number of large trees being removed from cities. A tree’s worth is assessed according to its size, health, life expectancy, historical significance and how many people live nearby to enjoy it – with each category given a monetary value. Mr Neilan said: ‘The aim was to stop big trees being felled without a very good reason.’
Labour has vowed to plant two billion trees by 2040 and create ten new national parks in a £3.7billion spending programme as part of its plans to tackle the climate crisis.
The Lib Dems have promised to plant 60million trees a year, while the Tories have pledged half that.