The Sycamore Gap tree was only about 150 years old. Sure it was striking given the position, but the outrage over it seems to be somewhat overexagerated.
Compare far less outrage when a restaurant chain chopped down a 500 year old tree. Where are the nationwide discussions about whether the CEO or branch manager (heh) or whatever should be going to prison for 5 years or 10 years.
Lio · 49m ago
I think the difference in outcry is because we know exactly who cut the 500 year old Enfield tree down.
These's no mystery, it was Toby Carvery owners Mitchells & Butlers plc.
It's also well known that they are now facing legal action because of this, so currently it seems that some kind of justice may be served.
That wasn't the case for Sycamore Gap. When that first happened it was a mystery who had committed a senseless act of vandlim and if they would get away with it.
The discussion of whether Phil Urban, Mitchells & Butlers CEO, should go to prison or not will happen when the case goes to trial (...but we all know he won't).
graemep · 4h ago
Negligence vs clear criminal intent.
mytailorisrich · 3h ago
As far as I understand, that restaurant cut down a tree that wasn't theirs without contacting the owner (the local Council). Any individuals doing the same would have been charged with criminal damage. Their apology and claim of "health and safety grounds" are rubbish in my opinion.
hilbert42 · 2h ago
"Any individuals doing the same would have been charged with criminal damage."
We see too much of employees, CEOs, boards etc. doing unacceptable stuff and riding roughshod over everyone and then hiding behind the protection of their corporations.
Statutory fine amounts are often set to be effective in normal circumstances, individuals, small and medium businesses, etc. but they're just small change to a large corporation. Clearly, the way around this is to strengthen laws so both corporations and their employees are fined.
Corporate fines should be set as a percentage of turnover to a level where it actually hurts the offending corporation (its shareholded profits, etc.), also the individual perpetrators within the corporation would be charged separately.
Much of this shit would stop if those responsible were hit with large fined and or thrown in the slammer. Being individually liable ought to send shivers down their spines, they'd then think twice before acting.
It seems to me the only reason the Law doesn't make effective use of this 'dual' approach to enforcement must be threats from Big Business to lawmakers to the effect that employees would be less inclined to make decisions thus it would stymie buisnness as a whole (large sectors of the economy would suffer with reduced profits etc.). If not, what else is stopping lawmakers from acting?
It's time laws were strengthened thus, we desperately need ways to reign in these wilful cowboys.
amiga386 · 2h ago
The restaurant conducted a safety review of its premises and the surrounding area, which it is legally required to. Even if it doesn't own the land, it is responisible for making sure it is a safe place for staff and customers.
This tree overlooked their car park, and if it had fallen or its limbs broke off, could easily crush, maim or kill people.
They relied on a specialist contractor to tell them whether all the trees in the vicinity were safe. The restaurant is legally required to mitigate hazards.
The (unnamed) specialist contractor said this particular tree wasn't safe due to dead and splitting wood. While the tree is in this legally-non-binding inventory of ancient trees, it was not subject to any specific tree protection order at the time the contractor gave the advice.
The restaurant took the contractor's advice and asked them to make it safe, which involved dismembering most of it. Only then did someone who actually cares about trees, and doesn't just see them as a box-ticking exercise or a way to make or save money, learn that this was happening and raise a fuss about it.
And now the tree has a tree preservation order, after being hacked to bits. It could have had a tree preservation order at any time in the past, but it didn't. If it did have one, the specialist contractor would have known, and would have advised the restaurant differently.
There aren't any specific villianous individuals anywhere in this story. This is a systematic problem, which is why tree heritage groups are campaigning for a law that protects ancient trees just for being ancient.
The way you fight the mundane evil that is bureaucracy is you add more bureaucracy; add in more restrictions on what companies, councils, governments can legally do. Otherwise this happens, and so does this:
None of that gives the right to chop down someone else's tree on some else's land. The reasonable course of action was to contact the tree's owner and to cordon off the area "at risk" in the meantime.
The only possible redeeming aspect is if the tree is part of the "demised land" of the restaurant, i.e. land that is part of their lease if they are leasing their premises (this is not mentioned in media reports as far as I know so it is unclear), but the reasonable course of action would still have been to contact the owner/landlord first as they usually must give permission.
Trees are already protected because, again, no-one has the right to chop down a tree that does not belong to them. This is why the people who chop down the Sycamore Gap Tree were charged with criminal damage. A tree preservation order adds another layer of protection in that even it is your tree you are no longer allowed to do any work on it without the Council's permission. In this case it is possible that they simply did not think it was necessary as the tree was in a Council-owned park.
amiga386 · 1h ago
The council own the land, and leased it to the restaurant. They claim the Toby Carvery "has broken the terms of the lease which requires Toby Carvery to maintain and protect the existing landscape"
There's no need to see malice where indifference and incompetence will do. You need to do a box-ticking exercise, you buy in an expert. The expert says you need to do X, you don't press too hard against that. They say they can do it for you. You assume they know what they're doing and say "OK, do it".
We'll have to wait for the courts to find out exactly who said what to who, and who made what decision, but this is about as much as we can infer for now. The tree's still gone.
hermitcrab · 11m ago
>The expert says you need to do X
There is quite a strong incentive for the 'expert' to say you 'need to do X' when they will get paid for doing it.
mytailorisrich · 1h ago
Ah thanks. Then it won't be criminal damage, indeed. Still not sure where the scale between malice and incompetence stands on that one, though.
DrBazza · 4h ago
You mean the tree cut down in or next to the Tottenham Hotspur training ground, or proposed development (I forget).
Also, the tree cut down by the restaurant chain, that's part owned by... one of the owners of Tottenham Hotspur FC.
Also the same club that couldn't redevelop their stadium until the scrap yard opposite vacated, which they refused to do. Then it 'mysteriously' burnt down.
Also, also, I don't subscribe to conspiracy, and I think these are just unfortunate random occurences. Million to one events happen 9 times out of 10.
No comments yet
mytailorisrich · 3h ago
Outrage is an emotion. The Sycamore Gap Tree was very famous, symbolic and a landmark, and thus its felling triggered a big emotional response even if arguably the felling of a 500 year old oak by that Toby Carvery restaurant is in a way "worse", indeed.
FiniteField · 3h ago
The outrage over the Sycamore gap felling, while somewhat justified, is mostly an outlet of expression for a latent feeling of nationalism that the ruling and middle classes of Britain feel they aren't allowed to acknowledge, even to themselves. There's no world where it's logically consistent that the felling of a 150-year-old tree is a national outrage, but the dissolution of the indigenous ethnic groups of Britain, almost within a single generation, with their 2000 years of history on the island, is not worth even commenting on (or is even something to celebrate).
For an even clearer example, see the case of the red squirrel.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
>is mostly an outlet of expression for a latent feeling of nationalism
I don't think so. It was the fact that it was such a pointless act of vandalism that caused so much outrage.
rainingmonkey · 1h ago
Exactly, Britain for the Britons!
Anglo-Saxons out, and take your ugly Germanic language with you!
Dude, stop fucking people about. The country was usurped about 1000 years ago by Frenchmen of Danish heritage and they rubbed the native Anglo-Saxon faces into the dirt. And those Anglo-Saxons had similarly usurped native Celtic peoples around 600 years before that. And let's not get into these Celtic people fighting Pictish people for control of proto-Scotland.
Trying to bundle all the UK's myriad historic ethnicities into a single "white british" category so you can other everyone else is nationalist bullshit.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
And ultimately, we all came from Africa's rift valley. We are all immigrants in the UK. It is just a matter when.
trextrex · 2h ago
Which are the indigenous ethnic groups experiencing dissolution?
FiniteField · 2h ago
White British is an ethnic umbrella recognised by the British government. In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births, and dropping significantly each year. A generation ago Britain was 90-95% White British. It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
DonaldFisk · 40m ago
> In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British , "In the 2021 Census, the White British group numbered 44,355,044 or 74.4% of the population of England and Wales." In Scotland the percentage is 87.1%.
You might be referring to the percentage of recent births to non White British parents, which is a different thing. (And, if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British.)
> It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.
pxeger1 · 1h ago
I agree it is happening and is and will be interesting to study, but I don’t think there is any reason other than racism to be outraged by it.
GlacierFox · 2h ago
Why have you highlighted this expression as something latent in the middle and ruling classes? I 100% agree with what you're saying and most of my 'lower class' (like myself) council housed friends I discuss this sort of thing with do also.
jimnotgym · 3h ago
And Sycamore is an invasive non-native species that gets actively removed from ancient forest as a weed.
JimDabell · 4h ago
If you like this, you might also like OpenTrees.org:
> OpenTrees.org is the world's largest database of municipal street and park trees, produced by harvesting open data from dozens of different sources.
Cool! I like how the official UK site in the OP avoids having a stuffy generic name and just goes with "Ancient". I guess this is like Java-speak for picking BritishBuild over UKExcludingNITreeFactoryConstructorPattern
opentrees.org seems to have very little data on the UK.
whywhywhywhy · 1h ago
love the idea and the data but the map just being kinda broken ruins this, the markers disappear when you zoom in, doesn't show the image of the tree when you click on it.
if you were trying to find interesting trees to visit with this in a browsing way it would be tedious.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
It is perhaps just a bit overloaded from the HN attention.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
Brilliant resource. I'm not sure about the word 'inventory' though. Wikipedia says:
"a quantity of the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilisation"
I hope that ancient trees are more than that.
Namari · 4h ago
Good idea, though it's failing to load when you point to another city than the one that was loaded automatically
metalman · 2h ago
there was an(old old) tree, and surounding medow destroyed for a roundabout(recent), not just any tree, but one with a literary conection, the authors name escapes me, the house of the author is part of the councils holdings, as was the tree and medow, but, famously, as per another author, "but roundabouts must be built", england somewhere , last 3-4 years
Most interesting examples are at https://web.archive.org/web/20240112222212/https://ati.woodl... and https://web.archive.org/web/20210926031301/https://ati.woodl...
Compare far less outrage when a restaurant chain chopped down a 500 year old tree. Where are the nationwide discussions about whether the CEO or branch manager (heh) or whatever should be going to prison for 5 years or 10 years.
These's no mystery, it was Toby Carvery owners Mitchells & Butlers plc.
It's also well known that they are now facing legal action because of this, so currently it seems that some kind of justice may be served.
That wasn't the case for Sycamore Gap. When that first happened it was a mystery who had committed a senseless act of vandlim and if they would get away with it.
The discussion of whether Phil Urban, Mitchells & Butlers CEO, should go to prison or not will happen when the case goes to trial (...but we all know he won't).
We see too much of employees, CEOs, boards etc. doing unacceptable stuff and riding roughshod over everyone and then hiding behind the protection of their corporations.
Statutory fine amounts are often set to be effective in normal circumstances, individuals, small and medium businesses, etc. but they're just small change to a large corporation. Clearly, the way around this is to strengthen laws so both corporations and their employees are fined.
Corporate fines should be set as a percentage of turnover to a level where it actually hurts the offending corporation (its shareholded profits, etc.), also the individual perpetrators within the corporation would be charged separately.
Much of this shit would stop if those responsible were hit with large fined and or thrown in the slammer. Being individually liable ought to send shivers down their spines, they'd then think twice before acting.
It seems to me the only reason the Law doesn't make effective use of this 'dual' approach to enforcement must be threats from Big Business to lawmakers to the effect that employees would be less inclined to make decisions thus it would stymie buisnness as a whole (large sectors of the economy would suffer with reduced profits etc.). If not, what else is stopping lawmakers from acting?
It's time laws were strengthened thus, we desperately need ways to reign in these wilful cowboys.
This tree overlooked their car park, and if it had fallen or its limbs broke off, could easily crush, maim or kill people.
They relied on a specialist contractor to tell them whether all the trees in the vicinity were safe. The restaurant is legally required to mitigate hazards.
The (unnamed) specialist contractor said this particular tree wasn't safe due to dead and splitting wood. While the tree is in this legally-non-binding inventory of ancient trees, it was not subject to any specific tree protection order at the time the contractor gave the advice.
The restaurant took the contractor's advice and asked them to make it safe, which involved dismembering most of it. Only then did someone who actually cares about trees, and doesn't just see them as a box-ticking exercise or a way to make or save money, learn that this was happening and raise a fuss about it.
And now the tree has a tree preservation order, after being hacked to bits. It could have had a tree preservation order at any time in the past, but it didn't. If it did have one, the specialist contractor would have known, and would have advised the restaurant differently.
There aren't any specific villianous individuals anywhere in this story. This is a systematic problem, which is why tree heritage groups are campaigning for a law that protects ancient trees just for being ancient.
The way you fight the mundane evil that is bureaucracy is you add more bureaucracy; add in more restrictions on what companies, councils, governments can legally do. Otherwise this happens, and so does this:
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/06/sheffield-ci...
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-64961358
The only possible redeeming aspect is if the tree is part of the "demised land" of the restaurant, i.e. land that is part of their lease if they are leasing their premises (this is not mentioned in media reports as far as I know so it is unclear), but the reasonable course of action would still have been to contact the owner/landlord first as they usually must give permission.
Trees are already protected because, again, no-one has the right to chop down a tree that does not belong to them. This is why the people who chop down the Sycamore Gap Tree were charged with criminal damage. A tree preservation order adds another layer of protection in that even it is your tree you are no longer allowed to do any work on it without the Council's permission. In this case it is possible that they simply did not think it was necessary as the tree was in a Council-owned park.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/16/toby-carvery-cou...
There's no need to see malice where indifference and incompetence will do. You need to do a box-ticking exercise, you buy in an expert. The expert says you need to do X, you don't press too hard against that. They say they can do it for you. You assume they know what they're doing and say "OK, do it".
We'll have to wait for the courts to find out exactly who said what to who, and who made what decision, but this is about as much as we can infer for now. The tree's still gone.
There is quite a strong incentive for the 'expert' to say you 'need to do X' when they will get paid for doing it.
Also, the tree cut down by the restaurant chain, that's part owned by... one of the owners of Tottenham Hotspur FC.
Also the same club that couldn't redevelop their stadium until the scrap yard opposite vacated, which they refused to do. Then it 'mysteriously' burnt down.
Also, also, I don't subscribe to conspiracy, and I think these are just unfortunate random occurences. Million to one events happen 9 times out of 10.
No comments yet
For an even clearer example, see the case of the red squirrel.
I don't think so. It was the fact that it was such a pointless act of vandalism that caused so much outrage.
Dude, stop fucking people about. The country was usurped about 1000 years ago by Frenchmen of Danish heritage and they rubbed the native Anglo-Saxon faces into the dirt. And those Anglo-Saxons had similarly usurped native Celtic peoples around 600 years before that. And let's not get into these Celtic people fighting Pictish people for control of proto-Scotland.
Trying to bundle all the UK's myriad historic ethnicities into a single "white british" category so you can other everyone else is nationalist bullshit.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British , "In the 2021 Census, the White British group numbered 44,355,044 or 74.4% of the population of England and Wales." In Scotland the percentage is 87.1%.
You might be referring to the percentage of recent births to non White British parents, which is a different thing. (And, if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British.)
> It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.
Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.
> OpenTrees.org is the world's largest database of municipal street and park trees, produced by harvesting open data from dozens of different sources.
— https://opentrees.org/
if you were trying to find interesting trees to visit with this in a browsing way it would be tedious.
"a quantity of the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilisation"
I hope that ancient trees are more than that.