Dear Readers, I hope that you’ll forgive a very London-centric post today, but I’ve been playing a bit with the London Street Tree online map, and I thought I’d share it with you so you can play too. You can find it at

https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-and-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/parks-green-spaces-and-biodiversity/trees-and-woodlands/london-tree-map

And this should take you to the screen above. Now you probably need to zoom in a bit to avoid all the trees just being blobs.

You can enter your postcode in the search box at the top left-hand corner, or you can zoom in yourself…

And once you’re in, hovering over a tree will tell you what it is  – as you can see, the tree on Huntingdon Road below is a Rowan, looked after by Barnet council

What, though, if you’re trying to find a particular species of tree, as I was earlier this week?

First, click on the ‘Hide’ button to get rid of all the trees.

Then, click on the tree that you’re interested in. You might remember a while back that I discovered that one of the ‘County Roads’ here in East Finchley was unlike the others, because it had lots of lime trees. And here is the proof, in case I needed any….

So, you can use the map to identify trees, or to find a particular kind of tree. There are a few drawbacks – a lot of the more recently planted trees are classified as ‘other’, which doesn’t give one a whole lot to go by. On the other hand, there is a Google View photo of each tree, at least in theory, so we probably shouldn’t quibble too much.

Anyway, I foresee hours of innocent fun exploring my local street trees with this, and I find myself wondering if other councils have done the same? Let me know readers! A street tree map of the UK, or indeed of every city in the world, would be a very fine thing.