Hackney council to plant ‘three football pitches’ of trees

HACKNEY Council has promised three football pitches worth of trees to be planted on the borough’s parkland over the next two years.

The roughly 30,000 trees will be funded by a drinks company through charity Trees For Cities, with the news coming hot on the heels of a November commitment for 5,000 more street trees in the same time period.

Hackney Marshes will see 6,500 plantings of edible woodland in the New Year, with public realm boss Cllr Jon Burke saying that the tens of thousands already promised by the Town Hall is a minimum ambition.

Cllr Burke said: “My ambition is, if you look at Hackney in ten years time, and it doesn’t look like we’ve built a city in the middle of a forest, then we’ll have failed. That is the aim.

“It’s only when there is no viable space left to deliver that we’ll have to start thinking more creatively about what we do next. If every local authority in the country was doing that, we’d see something quite dramatic in the UK.

“We are one of the smallest local authority areas in the whole of England, so if every council was doing what we are doing over the next two years or so, we’d plant 15 million trees between us.”