London

The London Tree Slowly Eating a Postbox

London does eccentricity well, but sometimes the city doesn’t even need to try. In Chelsea, on the corner of Drayton Gardens and Priory Walk, a London plane tree is gradually swallowing an Edwardian postbox. Not metaphorically. Properly, visibly, bark-over-metal, as if the tree got bored of pigeons and moved on to infrastructure.

The tree is known as the Kensington Postbox Tree, and it has become one of those brilliant half-hidden London curiosities: absurd, photogenic and strangely moving. The post box is still in use, which only makes the whole thing better. People are posting letters into an object that appears to be losing a very slow fight with nature.

What’s happening is less mysterious than it looks. Trees do not “eat” metal, however committed they may seem. They simply grow outwards year by year, wrapping around anything placed too close to the trunk. London planes, those soot-loving giants of the capital, are particularly good at this. They grow fast, grow big, and have a habit of making human street furniture look temporary.

There is something almost too perfect about it as a London sight. The plane tree is one of the city’s signature species, planted widely because it can survive pollution and punishment. The postbox is another emblem of civic London — sturdy, familiar, vaguely nostalgic. Put the two together for long enough and you get a tiny urban fable: nature and bureaucracy locked in a patient embrace on a genteel Chelsea corner.

So if you fancy seeing one of London’s oddest little landmarks, head to Priory Walk, SW10 9SP. It is not grand. It is not famous in the Buckingham Palace sense. But it is gloriously London: old, strange, slightly funny, and carrying on regardless.