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.
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).
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.
"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.
Government beurocracies acting under the status quo will never reign this sort of abuse in of their own accord because doing so would be suicide for their own power. The exact same laws, precedents, etc that let CEOs not go to jail are leveraged to great extend by government agencies and the agents thereof so the government will never bring the cases needed to reverse the precedents. The solution must be legislative, so there must be public interest and political will that legislators seek to pander to. There isn't the interest or will to reign in the government, people want them to be able to ride roughshod over perceived wrongdoers. And there isn't political will to write legislation that has a double standard of formally exempting government activity. So the local minimum we're stuck in is that bad actors can "do whatever" as long as they do it as part of their day job and don't leave a flagrant paper trail.
"The solution must be legislative, so there must be public interest…. There isn't the interest…"
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Or in this case you contact the owner of the tree before doing anything so that everything is agreed without surprises and arguments.
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]
Sure, in fantasy land. In reality the council made the leaseholder responsible for upkeep and maintenance and the last thing the council wants is to be contacted about the specifics of that because it comes off as an attempt to shift liability, which governments hate almost as much as uppity subjects, and any attempt to do so would likely have been met with stonewalling or some nonproductive ass-covering which would have driven up the scope and invasiveness of the tree clearing operation. Say nothing of the cost of all that communication. Maybe if there was a borderline improperly close between the government officials involved and the people working on behalf of the restaurant there could have been an off record conversation in good faith but without someone willing (because they're getting paid or otherwise) to stick their neck out the council isn't gonna say off record let alone go on record saying anything less than "get rid of anything and everything that could be a hazard" (with the judgement thereof to be performed by some party who will take on the liability).
The liability and responsibility situation is just to goddamned convoluted for any honest and reasonable exchange to happen.
No, that's not fantasy land at all, this is common sense, standard practice, and the default position if you are a tenant.
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.
We are not talking about asking your landlord if you can hang some window flower baskets from your studio. We are talking about a contract clause on the order of "keep the f-ing yard mowed and the trees trimmed" between two big evil organizations where Statistically Nobody(TM) really cares.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Archive.org link since it's already creaking a bit: https://web.archive.org/web/20250403094724/https://ati.woodl...
Most interesting examples are at https://web.archive.org/web/20240112222212/https://ati.woodl... and https://web.archive.org/web/20210926031301/https://ati.woodl...
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.
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).
Negligence vs clear criminal intent.
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.
"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.
Government beurocracies acting under the status quo will never reign this sort of abuse in of their own accord because doing so would be suicide for their own power. The exact same laws, precedents, etc that let CEOs not go to jail are leveraged to great extend by government agencies and the agents thereof so the government will never bring the cases needed to reverse the precedents. The solution must be legislative, so there must be public interest and political will that legislators seek to pander to. There isn't the interest or will to reign in the government, people want them to be able to ride roughshod over perceived wrongdoers. And there isn't political will to write legislation that has a double standard of formally exempting government activity. So the local minimum we're stuck in is that bad actors can "do whatever" as long as they do it as part of their day job and don't leave a flagrant paper trail.
"The solution must be legislative, so there must be public interest…. There isn't the interest…"
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….
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:
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/06/sheffield-ci...
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-64961358
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.
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"
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.
>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.
>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.
Or in this case you contact the owner of the tree before doing anything so that everything is agreed without surprises and arguments.
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...
Sure, in fantasy land. In reality the council made the leaseholder responsible for upkeep and maintenance and the last thing the council wants is to be contacted about the specifics of that because it comes off as an attempt to shift liability, which governments hate almost as much as uppity subjects, and any attempt to do so would likely have been met with stonewalling or some nonproductive ass-covering which would have driven up the scope and invasiveness of the tree clearing operation. Say nothing of the cost of all that communication. Maybe if there was a borderline improperly close between the government officials involved and the people working on behalf of the restaurant there could have been an off record conversation in good faith but without someone willing (because they're getting paid or otherwise) to stick their neck out the council isn't gonna say off record let alone go on record saying anything less than "get rid of anything and everything that could be a hazard" (with the judgement thereof to be performed by some party who will take on the liability).
The liability and responsibility situation is just to goddamned convoluted for any honest and reasonable exchange to happen.
No, that's not fantasy land at all, this is common sense, standard practice, and the default position if you are a tenant.
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.
We are not talking about asking your landlord if you can hang some window flower baskets from your studio. We are talking about a contract clause on the order of "keep the f-ing yard mowed and the trees trimmed" between two big evil organizations where Statistically Nobody(TM) really cares.
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.
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.
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.
London football clubs get up to some right shady stuff. West Ham are just as bad.
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.
Famous and symbolic since 1991 when it was in a Hollywood film…
It’s also a non-native species to the U.K.!
And Sycamore is an invasive non-native species that gets actively removed from ancient forest as a weed.
Related:
Ancient Tree Inventory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38318132 - Nov 2023 (11 comments)
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.
— https://opentrees.org/
For fans of Giant Redwoods in the UK there is also https://www.redwoodworld.co.uk/locations.htm
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
https://www.monumentaltrees.com
opentrees.org seems to have very little data on the UK.
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.
It is perhaps just a bit overloaded from the HN attention.
Good idea, though it's failing to load when you point to another city than the one that was loaded automatically
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
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.
Wiktionary:
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")