diamond geezer

Where is London's most central woodland?

By woodland I mean a dense area with tree cover you can wander through.
And by most central, I mean closest to Trafalgar Square.

There is a big tree from a Norwegian forest in Trafalgar Square at the moment but that doesn't count.

A good place to start looking is a map.

Hurrah for the Forestry Commission who maintain a National Forest Inventory woodland map allowing anyone to scroll around England and see where the woods are. There are a lot in Surrey. There are rather fewer in London.

According to the NFI woodland map the closest woodland to Trafalgar Square is in the corner of St James's Park, 250m distant.

[map snapshot]

I went to the corner of St James's Park and wasn't convinced.

I found lawns and shrubbery, also magnificent avenues of plane trees, also a tall lime near the weather station, also a screen of foliage around the park offices. I certainly found trees but I didn't find anything resembling the common understanding of woodland. What I found was a park, not woods.

I checked what the NFI woodland map is supposed to show and that explained it.

The National Forest Inventory (NFI) woodland map covers all forest and woodland area over 0.5 hectare with a minimum of 20% canopy cover, or the potential to achieve it, and a minimum width of 20 metres. This includes new planting, clearfell, windblow and restock.

20% canopy cover is quite low for what I might think of as woodland, which is denser-packed with broadly-spreading trees. Also the mention of 'potential' means the NFI map could include a lot of woodland that isn't (yet) woodland at all. I'm not sure what percentage canopy cover I find acceptable when I think of woodland but I'm sure it's much higher than 20%.

Other areas near Charing Cross the NFI map claims are woodland include Victoria Embankment Gardens (nope, gardens), St James's Square (nope, garden square) and Green Park (nope, another park). I decided to ignore the NFI map because its threshold for woodland was too low.

I tried ordinary maps instead.

• OpenStreetMap shows woodland in a darker green than grass, which sounded promising, but it too thinks the corner of St James's Park is woodland so it's much too loose. [map]
• Google Maps (and similar) show aerial imagery where you'd hope woodland would be obvious, but it turns out far too many places have close-together trees and this is no confirmation of land use underneath. [map]
• Ordnance Survey maps use green colouring and special symbols for woodland, especially at 1:50,000 scale, with parkland shaded very differently in grey, and this was much more promising. [map]

OS maps confirm a distinct lack of woodland anywhere near Trafalgar Square, as I suspected. Loads of parks because London is well blessed, but no woods anywhere until you get three miles out and then... aha.

This is Holland Park, not the southern part which is definitely parkland but the northern part which is 25 acres of trees. Within the woodland is the beautiful Kyoto Garden, also an adventure playground and an ecology centre, but essentially this is a deciduous landscape. It's woodland because it has dense trees and thick undergrowth, also various criss-crossing paths some of which are even potentially muddy underfoot. The catch is that everything's fenced off for protection creating a segmented environment of woody enclosures, so you can't actually walk through any of the woodland, merely alongside it. Holland Park isn't quite what I was looking for either.

I tried another map. Ah yes, I thought, the Woodland Trust.

Again their map confirms the scarcity of woodland in central London. Inside Zone 1 nothing. North towards Tottenham, nothing. West along the A40, nothing. The closest marker turns out to be Battersea Park Nature Areas to the southwest, although that's definitely more park than it is woods. The second closest is Holland Park, as previously mentioned. And the third is in the cluster of pins near Hampstead so that's where I went next.

This is Belsize Wood, just round the back of Belsize Park tube station. It's not ancient, it exists on the roof of a London Midland train tunnel, the remainder of which got turned into a council estate. Its not huge, more a long thin stripe on the steeper flank inappropriate for flats. But it is undeniably woodland, as you can see if you walk through the middle up a twisting set of fenced-in steps, its slopes planted with ash, sycamore and whitebeam. Just don't count on getting in.

The southern half is a nature reserve and firmly locked except to conservation volunteers and booked educational parties. A smart porch welcomes the fortunate with a chalkboard for recent nature sightings (currently blank) and various information boards. According to the map it contains a daffodil bank, four loggeries and a cherry tree planted to commemorate Agatha Christie's residence in the adjacent Isokon Building. A looping path passes through the trees, immaculately lined by logs and scattered with wood chippings, passing benches and a ventilation shaft along the way.

I'd read online that the reserve is open to the public on Wednesday afternoons but turned up within the three hour window and can confirm it isn't. Instead I had to make do with the less loved northern snippet, this only partly padlocked, where a short set of steps leads down to a brief perimeter path. It goes pretty much nowhere, passes several discarded plastic bags and re-emerges by a basketball court, but it is at least a walk in the trees.

For woods you can walk through willy-nilly, which to my mind is proper woodland, you need to head out further to the slopes of Hampstead Heath. Here trees and bushes grow freely across a considerable area, some enclosing the headwaters of the river Fleet, amid a woody landscape worthy of exploration. It's also ancient woodland, as can be determined on yet another online map (this from Natural England), so very much the real thing.

That's a photo from last autumn because I had no intention of going up onto Hampstead Heath during yesterday's downpours. But it is very much what I was hoping for when I went hunting for London's most central woodland... even if you have to head over four miles out of town to find it.