Herne Hill’s street trees Jeff Segal tells the story
Frankfurt Road c1920
H
erne Hill is a lovely, leafy place, with more street trees than in most inner London districts. There are roughly 1,500 altogether, spread rather unevenly over 100 streets, with about two-thirds of them on the Southwark side of SE24. Their story begins in the 1860s, when two things happened that would reshape the area dramatically. First, the railways arrived, with Herne Hill station opening in 1862 and North Dulwich six years later. Fast trains into the city were the catalyst for developers to start breaking up the grand properties of the merchant classes along Denmark Hill and Herne Hill and laying out streets of suburban housing. Until then the villas of the wealthy were “so graciously concealed by the fine trees of their grounds”, as John Ruskin put it, that the mile-long carriage ride from Camberwell might have seemed like a woodland drive. Old boundary trees or meadow trees would have heightened Ruskin’s sense of “leafy seclusion”, like the ancient elm at 50 Half Moon Lane or the aspens on Simpson’s Alley (now Ruskin Fawnbrake Avenue c1910 Walk). At the same time, a few miles north, construction began on Joseph Bazalgette’s revolutionary sewer system for London, designed to clean up the stinking, insanitary River Thames. A key element was the Thames Embankment, built on marshland on the north shore. The section between Westminster and Blackfriars bridges housed
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the main sewer from west London, gas and water pipes and the District Railway tube tracks beneath a major new road Most of London up to this point was a tangle of winding, narrow streets, but this remarkable avenue along the Thames gave the Metropolitan Board of Works the space and the opportunity to emulate the much admired tree-lined boulevards of Paris and other grand European capitals. In 1869, before the carriageway, railway and sewer were even finished, hundreds of London plane trees were planted at 20 ft intervals along the new 20 ft wide riverside footway. This was the first time that street trees of any species had been planted at a large scale in the capital. The London plane (Platanus x hispanica) had been known in Britain for almost 300 years and was selected for its tolerance of pollution from coal fires and the factory chimneys along the river. In Street Trees in Britain: a History, Mark Johnston writes that the lines of planes soon extended along Northumberland Avenue, then crossed the Thames to St George’s Road, Blackfriars Road and Tooley Street. They reached Herne Hill by the turn of the century. By then the new residential streets of Poets’ Corner, the Milkwood Estate and the roads around Kestrel Avenue were well established, but the streets between Herne Hill and the railway viaduct from North
Herne Hill – Spring 2022
