UK's Ancient Tree Inventory
ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk
ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk
Most interesting examples are at https://web.archive.org/web/20240112222212/https://ati.woodl... and https://web.archive.org/web/20210926031301/https://ati.woodl...
> OpenTrees.org is the world's largest database of municipal street and park trees, produced by harvesting open data from dozens of different sources.
I love how it's well defined. There are literally no redwoods in the UK before people went to America and even so, the giant species are still in their adolescent stage!
Ancient Tree Inventory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38318132 - Nov 2023 (11 comments)
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.
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...
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.
Even if they're not being paid for the work they're still gonna be conservative to cover their own ass because they're accountable to their own licensing board or there's some 3rd party government or perhaps private stats tracking their screw ups or whatever.
This is what you get when you have a subset of the general public hellbent on requiring that nothing get done without consulting a dozen different licensed professionals oversight by multiple departments, etc, etc.
In a "simple" evaluation of incentives there is no incentive to cut the tree if it's not a fairly undeniable hazard but the simplicity has been polluted with a complex spaghetti of requirements.
Especially it seems that the Council had apparently done their own assessment recently without finding issues: "According to the council leader, their experts said the tree was healthy and alive in December 2024." [1]
[1] https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/toby-carvery-faces-legal-actio...
The liability and responsibility situation is just to goddamned convoluted for any honest and reasonable exchange to happen.
There was no urgency: If some expert said the tree was dangerous then it would have been cordoned off while remedy was arranged. It was costing nothing to inform the landlord/owner.
I understand there's no urgency but regardless of timeframe it's just not reasonable to expect discussions to happen between government and a tenant in the way you think they should in the current regulatory environment. Nobody's immediate interest is served by doing it that way and everyone's interest is served by doing it the way they did except in this rare case the public interest and it blew up and became a "court of public opinion" thing hence the lawsuits flying every which way and the finger pointing.
If you want to see organizations act how you seem to want toward government then government needs to change. Organizations are unfeeling and sociopathic in pursuit of their goals. They are keeping the .gov at the maximum arms length possible, spreading liability all around, and letting these processes hum along and "fail" in dumb ways that are probably obvious to the people on the ground (but of course nobody will take on the responsibility of raising objection) because those failures are less terrible when they do occasionally happen than the kind of problems you'd get they didn't make it SOP to run the way they run.
The common sense you speak of has been implicitly outlawed by the high tax of liability that is levied upon it.
Be that as the case may be, as a non-expert, you better come up with a strongly sourced reason that the expert is wrong and you are right before you start to act.
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.
Sometimes I despair. I recall when doing Pol. Sc. decades ago Plato's criticisms of democracy and the more I observe its dysfunctional aspects the more I agree with him. Same with Churchill's sentiments.
As they day, "God helps those who help themselves", if the electorate isn't interested and or cannot understand the problems then dysfunction will continue and bad actors will have a field day.
I'm out of my depth here, I speculate about why the electorate isn't interested in helping itself but that's more a job for sociologists and psychologists, and I'm neither.
Ah well….
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.
The tree was well known in Blighty and famed long before its inclusion in a yank film.
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).
That's the clue to the outrage. It was well known and enjoyed by the general public, and a pair of morons decided they were going to ruin it for everyone, for no clear reason.
> Compare far less outrage when a restaurant chain chopped down a 500 year old tree.
It's a crime, hopefully it gets prosecuted, but it wasn't as iconic.
I don't think there's a mystery here.
It is a living thing. It should not be destroyed on a lark. Weather it is 10 year old or 150.
> Compare far less outrage when a restaurant chain chopped down a 500 year old tree.
This is directly attributable to succesfull public relationship management. Right away the company in question said that they got the advice from experts that the tree was a danger and needed to be removed. That takes the wind out of the outrage.
You might say that is not true. You might say tree surgeons will write whatever you want in their report. You might say that they should have informed the council. And you might be all true on those, i don’t know. What i know is that it becomes murky and that disarms the outrage.
“Unknowns killed a 150 year old living being for no reason whatsoever” is an outrage with no mitigations. “Wisdom of tree surgeons’ advice to pub is in dispute” is a head scratcher not an outrage. “Pub or their contractors fails to file necessary paperwork with Council before safety remediation work commences” is not an outrage but a yawn fest. “Property boundary dispute between Council and Pub” puts me right to sleep.
They are being remanded in custody for their own protection. They've received death threats.
It's a pile on powered by social media, by people who are willing to be outraged about this while eating their £12 carvery from a company that did it not on a lark, but for profit.
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.
2. A detailed list of all of the items on hand.
3. The process of producing or updating such a list.
From Latin "inveniō" ("to find out")