London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Thursday, August 21st, 2025.
Let’s call in at the This is London Book Club Corner to get us started. In the chair, the legendary Richard Porter, “the Pied Piper of Beatlemania.” Richard created and guides our Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and the Beatles In My Life Walk. Here’s Richard.
“I’m currently re-reading (and not for the first time!) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I just love its silliness and ideas.
Even though the first book came out in the late 70s – it’s amazing how much that Douglas wrote in the book has come true.
Connection with The Beatles? (well there has to be one!) Douglas Adams (full initials DNA!) was a huge Beatles fan – and I met him at Paul McCartney’s concert at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden – at one of McCartney’s smallest ever gigs. But there was nothing small about Douglas – he was 6 ft 7 and I’m 5 ft 5!”
Ah, many thanks, Rich. It’s a classic, isn’t it. And I have to confess, I haven’t read it. I’ll move heaven and earth to get to it.
Now speaking of heaven. And earth. Well, here in London those two poles are conjoined by London’s legendary plane trees.
Another way of putting that, You want to know London? Look up.
Look up, and there it is, lording it over us – the London Plane Tree. Our capital’s leafy crown. Without it, London would be a much harsher, greyer, dustier place.
Now, characteristics first.
What makes a London Plane… a London Plane?
Well, picture a trunk with leprosy. Don’t wince – it’s not an insult. It’s the tree’s genius. The bark flakes off in patches, as if it can’t decide on a colour – camouflage green here, dun brown there, cream elsewhere.
That flaking is its secret weapon. It sloughs off London’s muck – soot, grime, diesel particulates – just sheds it like dandruff. Self-cleaning bark!
London invented smog; the London Plane invented the cure.
And the leaves? Big, broad, five-lobed fellows – maple-ish, but chunkier. They do their job in spades: absorb pollutants, pump out oxygen, provide shade.
And then they drop in autumn, carpeting the pavements, clogging the drains, giving council workers something to curse about.
History. Ah yes, history. The London Plane is a hybrid, a lovechild of two exotic imports: the American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) and the Oriental plane (Platanus orientalis).
Mid-17th century, somewhere in Europe – maybe Vauxhall Gardens, maybe Spain, maybe London itself – those two got together, did what nature does, and bingo: Platanus × acerifolia, the London Plane.
Not native, but by God, it took to London like Dick Whittington.
The Victorians adored it. Industrial Revolution belching out smoke and soot? Never mind, plant a Plane!
Its bark sheds the filth.
Its leaves scrub the air.
Its roots don’t mind being paved over.
By the late 19th century, London was practically a Plane plantation.
How many today?
Well, London has nearly eight and a half million trees. There are nine million Londoners so that’s pretty much one tree each. So many trees that some ecologists have classified London as a forest.
Now, 1.36 percent of London’s trees are London Planes. That’s roughly 115,000 Plane trees. But the bald stats don’t tell the whole story. London’s Planes are concentrated in central London. Getting on for 100,000 of them lining the streets of central London. They dominate the beating heart of London. Its parks and squares and important thoroughfares. Hyde Park, for example, is 37 percent Plane trees. The Planes are the Sequoias of London.
Stand in Berkeley Square, or anywhere along the Embankment, or stroll through Bloomsbury, and you’re under their rule.
Oldest examples? There’s a cracker in Berkeley Square, planted in 1789 – the year of the French Revolution. Some in Brunswick Square are pushing 200. Battersea Park’s got venerable ones. And the Methuselah of them all – the Barnes Plane. Giant. Hollow trunk you could hold a meeting in.
Now, not everyone loves them. Allergic types curse their pollen. “London Plane hay fever” – sneezing fits in May and June. Though to be fair, the jury’s out. Some blame the pollen, some the fine hairs that come off the seed balls, drifting about like fairy dust. Either way, they can make your nose itch. And the shade they throw? It’s glorious for us, but it’s murder for grass. Ever notice bare earth beneath a Plane? That’s why.
But – and here’s the big but – think what they give us. Cooling the city in summer, cleaning the air, swallowing carbon, muffling noise. Homes for life, too. Birds love them. Crows, jays, starlings, parakeets – the lot. Bats flit about under their canopies. Insects nibble their leaves. Are they huggable? Oh yes. Big, broad trunks, rough to the touch, full of character. Hug away – you’ll feel like you’ve got your arms round a grizzled old Londoner.
Why “London Plane”? Easy. Because nowhere else in the world did they become so utterly the city tree. Paris has chestnuts, New York has elms (or did). London has Planes. The name stuck in the 19th century – they were the signature tree of the metropolis, so botanists and citizens alike started calling them that. No mayoral decree, no royal christening – just popular usage. London adopted them, and they adopted London.
The wood? Not bad at all. Furniture makers call it “lacewood” because of its lovely speckled grain. Looks like a piece of lace. Hard, heavy, but works a treat in veneers, cabinet-making, fancy inlay. The tree scrubs London’s air by day and then ends up polishing your dining table by night.
Anecdotes? Oh, plenty. There’s a famous story about Churchill. He once emerged from his house in Hyde Park Gate and, instead of striding into his waiting car, Winston Churchill turned and gave the great Plane Tree outside his home a little nod – as if to say, “Carry on, old chap.”
Or how about this tale? During the Blitz, when incendiaries rained down, Planes shrugged them off better than most trees. Thick bark, high moisture content. Fire-resistant heroes of the blackout.
And elsewhere? Ah, the London Plane has gone travelling. Exported all over the world. You’ll see them lining the boulevards of Melbourne, Sydney, Buenos Aires. Same mottled bark, same lofty height. But nowhere do they look quite so at home as they do shading a London terrace or gracing a London square.
Let’s end with a touch of poetry. Imagine it: a July afternoon, sun beating down, pavements shimmering. But step under a London Plane, and the temperature drops, the noise muffles, the air freshens. That’s not just shade – that’s civic architecture in leaf and bark. A Victorian invention, as much as the Tube or the red pillar box.
So next time you pass one, give it a nod. Maybe even a hug. The London Plane isn’t just a tree. It’s London’s lungs, London’s umbrella, London’s quiet companion. You could say the London Plane is the capital’s most successful immigrant.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.