I had a nice day in London today.
Nobody knows the age of this plane tree at the corner of Cheapside and Wood Street, but it's generally reckoned to be more than 200 years old. Some say it was there in Wordsworth's time and inspired his "Reverie of Poor Susan," but Wordsworth only mentions a caged thrush, not a tree.
It certainly adds a touch of class to a corner of town that's falling to the barbarians (the mobile phone shop with the chatspeak name was a gentlemen's shirtmaker's in the days when I worked round the corner). The bit of ground it stands on is part of the former churchyard of St Peter Cheap. The church was destroyed in the Great Fire, but the little St Peter plaque on the railings (inset) was salvaged and has obviously been refurbished recently.
