From concrete jungle to greenest city in Europe
‘Does Birmingham even have any trees?’
By Rachel Segal Hamilton
"A tree tells a story," enthuses Lawrence Weston. "You can read how it's been planted and how it's been maintained, how it has responded to the weather, the wind." I'm on a road in Billesley with Lawrence and other Birmingham TreePeople volunteer street surveyors one crisp autumn afternoon. The group has a single mission: to check on every tree in the city, from the young upstarts to the mighty elders. "I think it’s like being a medical doctor, surveying trees,” another volunteer, Jeevan, tells me, while inspecting some branches. She’d know: she spent her career in public health before retiring a few years ago.
If you ask someone to sum up Birmingham, chances are ‘forest’ isn’t what comes out of their mouth. Concrete jungle, perhaps. But in the 1870s, then-mayor of Birmingham Joseph Chamberlain kicked off the longest-running street tree planting programme in Europe (a wartime pause notwithstanding). Today, Brum is among the most tree rich cities on the planet and has more green space than any other European city at 8,000 acres. The UN has awarded us 'Tree City of the World’ status every year since the scheme was launched in 2019 to recognise steps taken to monitor, protect and celebrate arboriculture. This year, we hosted the inaugural UK Tree Cities conference at The Exchange. So how did we get here – and why aren’t more people aware of our extraordinary tree population?
Historically, we didn't need to pay much attention to our trees to ensure their growth and survival. Forests once covered the West Midlands. Gradually, settlements emerged from the thicket. Anywhere with the suffix ‘ly’ or ‘ley’ comes from the Old English word for a clearing, a clue Moseley, Shirley, Yardley began amid clusters of trees. The Romans struggled to build roads in the dense woodlands here. The Forest of Arden used to stretch across this region, taking in what’s now Birmingham, before it was cleared for agriculture and logging in the Middle Ages. Traces live on in areas of Sutton Park and Moseley Bog. You sense in the tangled branches that inspired the fantastical lands of J.R.R. Tolkien, the forest that – combined with Ardennes in Belgium and Shakespeare’s imagination – was the setting for As You Like It.
The 1086 Domesday Survey is where ‘Birmingham’ gets its first name check. From there, Brum grew and grew, our numbers swelling from 1,000 in the 16th century to 15,000 in the late 17th to 70,000 during the Industrial Revolution, as it transformed into a global centre of manufacturing. Trees gradually had to compete for space with new houses, workshops and factories belching out smoke. In this flurry of urban construction, little thought was given to the impact on the city’s greenery, though suburbs naturally retained more trees – lower density living left space for gardens. Around this time, Birmingham and its surroundings gained their less than bucolic reputation. One (unverified, but oft repeated) story that does the rounds is about Queen Victoria who, while passing through the nearby Black Country, demanded the curtains of her train carriage be drawn to shield her from the unsightly view.
She wasn’t alone in making assumptions about the area. More recently, an American professor, Tim Beatley of the Virginia School of Architecture, visited Brum for a 2014 conference on trees. He was met with astonishment when he told an airport customs officer what he was doing in the UK. “‘You’re going to a conference about trees in Birmingham?’,” he asked me incredulously,” Beatley wrote in a blogpost afterwards. “‘Does Birmingham even have any trees?’”
Actually, despite its reputation for grey urbanity, Birmingham has just over a million trees – not far off one for every person. And that’s in no small part thanks to the Victorians and Edwardians. Many mature trees here grow in what were once the private grounds of country estates, eventually left to us plebs by the wealthy and powerful families that owned them, from the Calthorpes to the Cadburys.
Louisa Ryland hoped Cannon Hill Park, once part of the Ryland Estate, would “prove a source of healthful recreation to the people of Birmingham.” Joseph Chamberlain bequeathed the grounds of his home, Highbury Hall, after he died in 1914. More than a century later, Highbury Park was a welcome escape for many families during stifling Covid-19 lockdowns. I remember my children’s reaction on arriving there after weeks of dutifully trooping to closer, more manicured Kings Heath Park. “Mommy! Mommy! It’s the countryside!” they shrieked, scampering away up trees like squirrels.
The 20th century brought a new challenge. Cars – once a rare sight on Brum’s roads, if you can imagine that. After the Second World War, civil engineer Herbert Manzoni masterminded Birmingham’s ‘Motor City’ makeover. Unsentimental about the past, he knocked down swathes of heritage architecture in the name of slum clearance. In his American-influenced tarmac utopia, high speed roads sliced up old neighbourhoods, separating cars and pedestrians, who scuttled from A to B in dingy underpasses. Birmingham was the future, the car was king and trees were incidental.
This is a Brum that Simon Needle recognises. You’d never peg Simon as a council bigwig with his signature green hoodie and his friendly, open manner. Now Urban Forestry and Nature Lead at Birmingham City Council, he started out in 1979 as an eight-year-old volunteer junior ranger in Waseley Hills Country Park.
Simon has been involved with trees ever since, making a career out of his passion. When he started working for the council back in 1990, New Street was yet to be pedestrianised but away from the roads, things were picking up for trees, with a growing emphasis on woodland conservation. There was not, he says, the “holistic” understanding of trees that we have now. But the seeds were there.
Rangers like Simon then worked on creating and supporting habitats, running activities to connect people with nature within Birmingham’s green spaces. Meanwhile, the city’s trees ticked along until one tragic rush hour morning in 1999. A diseased ash tree came down on Alcester Road South, smashing a bus shelter and fence and killing three people. The Forest Council’s David Rose noted the approximately 200-year-old tree’s roots were rotted with multiple fungal infections. West Midlands Police considered bringing a manslaughter charge against the council. "It would appear that Birmingham City Council did not have a proactive response to tree maintenance,” Detective Inspector Ian Ford told the court two years later. "They would wait for a member of the public to contact them regarding the state of trees on the highway." The council was fined £150,000.
Following another death in 2005, this time in Cannon Hill Park, the council carried out a 2006 scrutiny review. As well as making recommendations for improving the way contractors worked around trees and improving how tree health was recorded, it concluded that the significance of trees needed to be more actively promoted in the city. At the same time, new organisations were cropping up which were already attuned to the significance of trees. Among them were Birmingham Open Spaces Forum in 2004, a consortium of volunteers and park friends groups and in 2007 Birmingham Trees for Life, part of the Birmingham Civic Society.
In 2010, a private company, Amey, won a 25-year contract with the council to maintain trees on the highways but they couldn’t always keep pace with the trees falling victim to rapid redevelopment during this period (ultimately their contract would be cut short in 2019, when the council decided they weren’t up to scratch). Nonetheless, Brum’s green credentials got a boost in 2013 when it was the first UK city to join Biophilic Cities, an international network of cities that encourage contact with nature. But Simon thought more could be done.
He saw that the well of enthusiasm of those coming forward to volunteer for Birmingham Trees for Life tree planting sessions offered untapped potential for community engagement and education. Tree planting season runs in the winter, from November to March. What about the rest of the year? For a while, he and arboriculturalist Ian “Mac” McDermott had been bouncing around the idea of a city-wide programme for urban forest volunteers. Mac had run successful similar projects in Coventry and Walsall inspired by the American ‘tree warden’ movement where citizens take responsibility for tending trees.
While it was psychoanalyst Erich Fromm who coined the term biophilia —“the passionate love of life and of all that is alive” — ecologist Edward O.Wilson fleshed out the theory from an evolutionary perspective in his 1984 book Biophilia. In it, he argued humans shared "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life". This urge seemed in evidence when Mac and Simon took their plan to Birmingham Open Spaces Forum in late 2016. They were stunned by the response. Around 60 people showed up to their training session at Kings Heath Park. “The venue wasn’t big enough to take everybody,” remembers Simon.
The next logical step was to formalise as a charity – named Birmingham TreePeople – so they could apply for funding. Then, as now, the council had no dedicated tree budget. One of the people who took Mac’s course was Nina Griffiths. A childminder by profession, Nina wanted to top up her tree knowledge following a forest school qualification. At first, “It went completely over my head,” she tells me, but six months in, something clicked and she hasn’t looked back. A Birmingham TreePeople trustee since 2021, Nina now leads on street surveying.
Progress wasn’t linear. After the oldest tree in Birmingham’s city centre was razed to the ground in February 2017, a public outcry ensued. Perhaps in response to this, less than two months later, the council approved a motion that officially recognised the value of Brum as a “green city”. They also called for a review of city council tree policy, and that 2018 review prompted a step change. Finally council strategy began emphasising “The Birmingham Urban Forest” and the review put a price tag on trees for the first time, pointing to the economic benefits they bring. A 2019 Consultancy for Environmental Economic Policy report found that every £1 spent by BCC brings a £24 return. Since then, this has been factored into the council’s dealings with private developers, though not always meeting campaigners’ satisfaction.
When Simon’s 2019 application for Tree City of the World was approved, Birmingham became one of two UK cities to earn the accolade, along with three London boroughs. Beyond the prestige, this signalled a commitment from the council. The Tree City mindset has pushed them in important directions. In 2021, the council and Birmingham TreePeople commissioned a pioneering Urban Forest Masterplan with targets for developing our treescape set up to the year 2051. At the time it was the only document of its kind in the UK. Now other councils have followed.
But how successful have efforts been? Canopy cover — the area covered by a tree or trees when viewed from above — is one way you can gauge how tree-dense an area is. Canopy cover across Birmingham is 20%, which makes this city a forest (according to the UN, anything over 10% is a forest). Given Brighton and Bristol, which have a greener hue politically, boast rather less canopy cover — 13% and 12% respectively — as Simon Needle puts it, “We’re not doing too badly”.
There is a ‘but’, unfortunately. Birmingham’s canopy cover figure is very much an average. The reality is a sharp disparity in terms of which areas get access to trees. In leafy Sutton Coldfield, canopy cover is as high as 45%, whereas inner city Alum Rock has only 8%. Birmingham is not a tree city everywhere – at least not yet. ‘Tree equity’ is the simple idea that we should all have equal access to trees. This principle is at the heart of the Masterplan, which aims to increase canopy cover across the whole city, with a sharp focus on wards currently below the average for tree equity.
Birmingham TreePeople aren’t the only ones contributing towards this goal. The University of Birmingham’s Institute of Forest Research is carrying out innovative studies into trees that will inform policy here, while Birmingham Botanical Gardens now run their own WMCA funded tree surveying programme, to name a few. Fruit and Nut Village have been planting edible orchards since 2018 in Balsall Heath, Druids Heath and Stirchley. Fruit & Nut founder Rob Tilling, a longtime environmentalist, has observed attitudes changing over the last decade. “Before, it was all about grass and flowers.”
I ask what he likes about trees. He doesn’t miss a beat: “they give us timber; materials for building shelter; food; ecological services like locking carbon away; holding the soil in place, and adding nutrition through the leaves falling to the ground…” Turning to wave goodbye to a volunteer, he finally takes a breath, “they give us comfort and make us happy,” he adds. “They do so many things.”
A tree city is a healthy city. Chatting with volunteers, the word ‘care’ comes up a lot. You care for trees and they care for you: a sort of leafy mutual aid. The areas with fewest trees tend to be the least cared for, the areas with the highest deprivation, the highest air pollution, the areas most vulnerable to increasing climate risks like heat islands and floods, where you can expect to live on average a decade fewer than fellow Brummies in better off wards.
There is pushback. We’re seeing a rise here in trees destroyed to make way for drop kerbs illegally installed for driveway access. Volunteers talk of the damage they’ve logged from drivers ramming into trees as they mount grass verges to park or attacking them with weed killers. “I’ve had people come up to me personally and scream and shout right in my face,” says Simon, “telling me if I plant a tree, they’ll ‘f’ing kill it’ or ‘rip it straight out.’”
Future Brum, according to the council, will be a place where nature is woven through our streets, with green space taking up a third more land and the Ring Road is reimagined as a linear park, where walking and cycling in the shelter of trees is the norm. The council’s financial quagmire may have deepened recently but it’s decades in the making (remember the last council cutbacks? And the ones before that?) That vision of the future is appealing but it can feel a long way off in many parts of our city, particularly as we face a slashing of our park ranger service. We’re in a pretty precarious position right now, dependent on the goodwill of volunteers, fundraising capabilities of charities, and the whims of the market dictating developers’ priorities and clout.
The shoots are there, though, in Birmingham’s beautiful trees, which keep pushing upwards, nurtured by the fiercely committed tree champions I met researching this, despite or maybe because of the cars, the concrete, the hostility. “In the countryside, nature can be quite depleted but in Birmingham, it feels close to the surface,” Dan Burwood, who runs Fruit & Nut Balsall Heath, told me. I agree. That wildness is what I love about living here. To build on this, and reach that future, though, we need new stories about Birmingham. Not the stories others tell. The stories we know are true and the stories that we want to be true. The kind of stories Lawrence read in the resilience of trees. Stories that – like the best fairy tales – begin and end in a forest.
Another brilliant article. I knew we had over a million trees but not the whole story, so thank you for filling in all the gaps. I know people who live in my road who would be happy to see all the trees removed. Education is key. Pitts Wood in Quinton, only 0.8 of an acre but it is what is left of an ancient forest. It is almost entirely cared for by volunteers. A local primary school uses it as part of the childrens' education due to the head teacher recognising it's unique value.
We mustn't be complacent we need to be planting new and replacing old trees, not all are long lived. Most of all the City Council needs to be much more proactive in declaring Tree Preservation Orders and enforcing when less enlightened citizens damage or destroy trees At the moment they are positively asleep.