London

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/27574524

A centuries old oak tree in Enfield has been hacked down by a Toby Carvery causing uproar among local residents and conservationists.

Enfield Council demanded police investigate the felling it considered “criminal damage”, after receiving reports on April 3 that an ancient tree in Whitewebbs Wood was found to have been cut down.

Experts carried out a full investigation of the site to assess the damage and a Tree Preservation Order has now been placed on the tree to protect it from any further damage.

The tree, referred to as the ‘Guy Fawkes Oak’ due to its proximity to the Whitewebbs House where the Gunpowder Plot was planned, is thought to have been in the top 100 of London's 600,000 oak trees in terms of its size before it was cut down.

Enfield Council released a statement earlier today to confirm they had reported the the matter to police.

It has now emerged that the owners of a nearby Toby Carvery felled the tree believing it was a “health and safety risk”.

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The paper said an arboreal expert, employed by the firm, had decreed that the tree — which stood near the pub’s car park — was dead, and that the only course of action was to cut it down. But other experts have said the tree “could have lived for another century or more.”

Standing at 6.10metres in height, the ancient tree has been listed in the Woodland Trust’s Ancient Tree Inventory as a Pedunculate oak , situated in a public park with open access.

We are a household with two kids under 4, and a broken washer/drier, and currently no timeframe for when it will be fixed (waiting for a part). Needless to say, a crisis is brewing.

We've tried one 24h laundry service which turned 9 pairs of socks into 9 individual socks, so that... well... sucks. Pickup and delivery were perfect though, so swings and roundabouts I guess.

Thus I'm looking for any recommendations for reliable overnight laundry services, preferably also providing pickup and delivery.

With the country getting hotter, the ground underneath most houses in London will be drying out and becoming softer due to clay soil shrink-swell, leading to a massive increase in insurance claims for subsidence.

No one will want to buy a house with known subsidence because insurance normally only covers repairs for subsidence if it wasn't mentioned in the original survey report.

This is going to mean a huge reduction in houses prices all around London as they try to offload their houses that will need remedial action undertaking to prevent damage to the house.

This page shows a map of how London is going to be affected.

Most susceptible are properties in the highly-populated London areas, particularly in northern and central London boroughs, and Kent in the South East. Projections suggest that the number of properties in London likely to be affected by climate will rise from 20 per cent in 1990, to 43 per cent by 2030, and almost 3 times 1990 values (57 per cent) by 2070.

https://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/maps-show-the-real-threat-of-climate-related-subsidence-to-british-homes-and-properties/

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26244752

Geography mattered on the Bloomberg site in the heart of the City, close to the Bank of England. The Walbrook, a lost river of London, had carved a deep valley into the landscape and the Romans constantly tried to reclaim the banks as the city grew and prospered. They did this by packing the ground with rubbish, building on it, then packing it again, three more times, so there is a stratigraphical layer cake of Roman trash going almost all the way back to London’s creation, in AD47 or 48. The river also waterlogged the ground, protecting the material from oxygen: leather, brooches, shoes, writing tablets, wood, animal bones and ceramics were all phenomenally well preserved. There are sandals that look fresher than last year’s Birkenstocks.

Site B2Y10 – to give it its academic name – was previously occupied by Legal and General, which dug deep in the 1950s, to create the biggest post-blitz rebuild in the City. Excavating archaeologists found the third-century Temple of Mithras, and oral histories from Londoners who witnessed the find in 1954 recall a magical atmosphere, when the secrets of the ancient past met the regeneration of the postwar present to create a sense of enormous hope and renewal. People queued for hours to see the temple. One woman who was pregnant at the time called her baby Mithra. As significant as that archaeological yield was, it was pretty haphazard – workers on the site were just picking things up and handing them in.

The Legal and General building had huge double basements, except on one side, where they had had to stay shallow for fear of jeopardising a Christopher Wren church on the opposite corner. “We were so excited by that single basement,” Jackson says. “We knew that in the layer underneath, that they hadn’t dug into, a lot of material would have survived.” Across 150 years of previous Roman recoveries in London, 19 writing tablets were found in total. In this one find, there were 400, of which 80 have already been deciphered. These are wooden frames, with an inset writing area about “the size of a Ryvita”, which would be filled with black wax, then written on.

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Then there are anomalies that tell us something about the limits of Roman understanding. Jackson shows me a black, pebble-like object with three indentations on it, in which someone has tried to make a hole, to turn it into a pendant. Finding the material unnaturally unyielding, the Romans decided these were “solidified thunderbolts”, she says. “It’s so interesting to think of Romans doing archaeology themselves.” Not very well, mind; it wasn’t a solidified thunderbolt, it was a neolithic hand-axe made of obsidian.

It’s a reminder that we modern humans are also capable of misreading the signs. In the 1954 excavation, for example, they found beads that were assumed to have been worn by a woman, but here, those same beads and amulets were found still on their original strings, alongside other material that indicates they were worn by a horse. “It might have been a lady horse,” Marshall allows. Horses wore amulets covered in sexual imagery – such as fist-and-phallus amulets, with a clenched fist gesture at one end and an unmetaphorical phallus at the other, which was thought to ward off the evil eye. Children also wore amulets to ward off plague.