Londoner’s Diary: Tyburn Tree

This was one of the first pictures I took for the Londoner’s Diary, back in 2002 I think. I’d gone there because I read that there was a plaque marking the site of the Tyburn Tree, and I was writing about this for some publication. The plaque embedded on a traffic island was small and dull, and the whole site, where public hangings were carried out from 1388 until 1783, was mostly given over to a multi-lane junction at the bottom of the Edgware Road and west end of Oxford Street. Way above the traffic and the crowds streaming onto Oxford Street was a security camera, very high on a pole. With its dangling cables, there seemed to be some echo of the Tyburn Tree in this piece of street furniture. It was a reversal though: where crowds had previously gathered to watch a spectacle, now it was the people who were being watched.