Baltic Wharf: Green Bristol Council Goram Homes Fell 70 Mature Trees In A Week To Build Luxury Flats

My partner and I began our life in Bristol in St Werburghs, starting the City Farm there in 1980. As it got going, with great help from some wonderful City Council officers in the planning and parks departments, we planted trees with children from six local primary schools. https://politicsthisweek.gn.apc.org/2026/09/the-bristol-politics-show-presented-by-tony-gosling-40/ Those children, I hope, will always carry the memory of that planting. And I hope they go and visit the trees – now over 40 years old and flourishing in the wondrous environment of the City Farm. https://bristoltreeforum.org/tag/baltic-wharf-trees/ Complaint that the council 'misled public' over Baltic Wharf trees https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/complaint-council-misled-public-over-10755164 "Officers continued to misinform in subsequent council meetings" They were the trees on the banks of the Floating Harbour in Bristol deemed so important that as many as 70 women symbolically ‘married’ each one as part of a long-running campaign to save them. But, as this timelapse video shows, it only took a week or so to completely clear all the trees from what is now a development site. And while the council-owned Goram Homes and its development partner get started on building 166 new flats in a prime location at Baltic Wharf, there is controversy about plans - or lack of them - to replace the trees that were cut down before Christmas. A formal complaint has been submitted to Bristol City Council which claims planning officers misled councillors and the public when they said there wouldn’t be a problem planting new trees to replace the 84 trees that have been felled on the former site of the Caravan Club park between the Floating Harbour and the New Cut River Avon. The complaint claims that council officers ‘undermined the quasi-judicial planning process’ by reassuring councillors finding places to plant new trees was all in hand. Back in April 2024, councillors on the planning committee met to give the final go-ahead for Goram Homes’ plans for the development, and part of the application was a legal requirement that 162 trees should be planted within a mile of the Baltic Wharf site, to make up for the 84 cut down. “At the meeting, doubt was expressed as to whether it was possible that 162 trees could be planted within a mile radius of the development, due to lack of tree planting locations,” the complaint, which has been submitted by the Bristol Tree Forum, said. Workers clearing the former caravan park at Baltic Wharf in Bristol today, Monday 13 October 2025, as trees have been cut down and the area stipeed of vegetation “These concerns were unequivocally dismissed, and the committee was told by planning officers with certainty that all 162 trees would indeed be planted. The case officer said ten would be on the waterfront beside the site or on Cumberland Road, that “Parks” had mapped around 40 trees (at the time of the meeting), and they assured the committee that they would ‘in the next few weeks provide full mapping of all of the trees’.” Councillors gave planning permission for the trees to be cut down, but the Bristol Tree Forum say replacing the trees has never happened - and what’s more this follows a pattern of council officers promising new trees would be planted to compensate for trees cut down, at a site just across the road from the caravan park. In 2013, trees around the A Bond bonded warehouse were cut down to make way for the new Metrobus road near the Cumberland Basin, and 55 were supposed to be planted nearby, but never have been. Bristol Tree Forum continued to demand answers about the 162 trees the council were supposed to be planting near the Baltic Wharf site. In October 2024, six months after permission was granted, a council chief told the campaigners that a map of the places the 162 trees would be planted was coming, and again in January, the chair of the council’s planning committee was reassured the full map of sites was coming, soon. ...“This is not an isolated incident, and it seems to have become standard procedure to promise planning committees that all replacement trees will be planted, in order to secure planning approval, only for this promise to be entirely abandoned or at best to fall well short of the requirements. “For officers to misinform planning committees in order to secure planning approval for an application they are advocating, undermines the integrity of the whole planning process, and cannot be allowed to continue,” they added...