Chapter Fifteen
Seven Sisters
The Trees That Died and the Name That Replanted Them
Why is Seven Sisters called Seven Sisters?
In brief: Seven Sisters is named for a celebrated group of seven trees at Page Green in Tottenham. The trees were repeatedly replanted, while their name passed to the road, district and station.
Transport context: London Underground and London Overground station.
In 1886 seven sisters go out to plant seven trees on Page Green.
Their surname is Hibbert. The trees are young elms. The ground lies beside Tottenham High Road, where the village has been turning into a suburb with disconcerting speed. Villas, terraces and shops are advancing across land that older residents remember as fields. Trains have been stopping nearby for fourteen years. Seven Sisters Road now brings traffic from Holloway to the junction. What had once been a landmark at the edge of a rural settlement is becoming an object that must be deliberately kept.1
The sisters use a spade made important by repetition.
They are not planting the first Seven Sisters. No one can identify those women, if women there ever were. They are replacing trees already famous enough to have named a road, a railway station and a neighbourhood. The act is therefore practical and ceremonial at once. Roots go into Tottenham soil. A story is put back where people expect to find it.
The name survives by being made again.
Not because the original trees live for centuries. They do not. Not because the legend can be proved. It cannot. Seven Sisters survives because each generation inherits a number, a place and an obligation to make them agree.
The earliest history is obscured by the neatness of the tale.
At Page Green, where the High Road meets what is now Broad Lane, a group of seven elms once stood in a circle around another tree, usually described as a walnut. The arrangement was conspicuous in an open landscape. Travellers approaching Tottenham could recognise it before they reached the houses. The trees became a point of reference: near the Seven Sisters, beyond the Seven Sisters, at the Seven Sisters.2
Why seven?
One tradition says the elms grew naturally around the walnut. Another says seven sisters of a local family planted them in the fourteenth century. Later versions push the story farther back, or supply motives, names and private griefs that the record does not contain. The number encourages invention. Seven daughters are easier to remember than seven agricultural trees; a family makes a better story than chance growth.
The legend may reach into the Middle Ages. The evidence does not.
What can be said securely is that the trees were an established local landmark long before the railway and that an engraving made from a drawing by H. C. Fields records the group at Page Green around 1818.1 In that image the trees do not yet appear as a green island trapped by traffic. They belong to a looser settlement, with open ground and low buildings around them. Their importance comes partly from visibility. Before street numbers, illuminated signs and maps carried in every pocket, a distinctive clump of trees can organise a journey.
Tottenham’s High Road is much older than the suburb that later closes around it. It forms part of the northward route through the Lea-side settlements, carrying people, livestock, carts and coaches between London and the country beyond. Page Green occupies a widening near the road. The trees stand where movement must take notice of them.
Then London requires a more direct road.
In the early nineteenth century, traffic between Islington and Tottenham still has to find its way through older lanes and uneven suburban routes. Seven Sisters Road is constructed in 1832, running east from Holloway towards Page Green.3 Its western end begins among the expanding northern districts of London. Its eastern destination is a ring of trees.
The road carries their name away.
This is an extraordinary enlargement for a small landmark. Seven trees in Tottenham become several miles of street. The phrase appears on addresses far from Page Green and enters the daily speech of people who may never see the trees themselves. A shop can stand on Seven Sisters Road without being near any sister. A letter can be sent there. A bus, later, can display the words across its front.
The name becomes linear while its origin remains circular.
Development follows the road slowly at first, then with force. Tottenham’s population grows as London pushes north and railways make daily travel possible. Market gardens and estates are cut into plots. Builders produce terraces for clerks, artisans and labourers. The open spaces between older hamlets contract. By the later nineteenth century, the rural landmark is being surrounded by the urban world it has helped to name.4
The railway arrives in 1872.
The Great Eastern Railway opens Seven Sisters station on its route through Stoke Newington towards Edmonton. The station does not need to invent a title. It borrows the road’s borrowed name. Passengers can now purchase a ticket bearing words that began with trees, though the platforms lie some distance from the original group at Page Green.5
The sequence is complete: trees name a road; the road names a station; the station helps name a district.
The trees themselves remain the least permanent part.
Elms age, fail and are cut down. Road works alter the ground. Buildings press closer. Pollution and disease make survival difficult. The old group is replanted, then replanted again. By the late nineteenth century, continuity no longer means guarding the same trunks. It means reproducing the arrangement.
This is where the Hibbert sisters enter.
In 1886 they plant a new group. In 1928 members of the same family repeat the ceremony. The interval is long enough for Tottenham to change almost beyond recognition. The second planting takes place in a borough of electric trams, factories, cinemas and dense streets, but the ritual still requires seven women, seven trees and the old place.1
The spade is kept.
An ordinary tool becomes an instrument of succession. Its value lies not in age alone but in the hands attached to it. The blade breaks Tottenham soil in one generation and returns in another. The object allows the ceremony to claim continuity even when the trees cannot.
In 1955 seven Basten sisters plant again.
By then the elm is approaching a catastrophe no ceremony can prevent. Dutch elm disease will transform the British landscape in the following decades, killing mature trees on a scale that makes local replacement part of a national loss. At Page Green the precise species will eventually change. The number will not.
The Families Who Made Seven
In December 1996 the ceremony is assembled once more.
This time one household cannot supply the whole cast. Five Tottenham families take part: the Baptistes, the Fordhams, the Littletons, the Monks and the Robinsons. Between them are several groups of seven sisters. The Tree Trust for Haringey has organised the planting. Seven hornbeams will replace the earlier elms.1
The choice is practical. Hornbeams are not elms, and no one pretends otherwise. They are planted because a living landmark matters more than botanical purity.
The families gather at Page Green. The old spade is brought out again.
There is a useful honesty in the scene. Tradition often disguises change by claiming that nothing important has altered. Here the changes are visible. The trees are a different species. The planters come from several families. Five present-day families now supply what legend assigns to one. The ceremony does not recover a lost medieval household. It makes the old story answer to the people living around it.
Seven is produced collectively.
Each tree enters ground already burdened with names. Page Green. Tottenham. Seven Sisters. The roots are new; the language is not. The women are not asked to prove descent from the unknown sisters of legend. They are asked to continue a public act.
The same spade used in earlier plantings is later preserved at Bruce Castle Museum and Archive.6 Separated from the soil, it becomes documentary evidence of ritual: a plain tool that has acquired a catalogue, a provenance and a story.
The hornbeams grow.
Around them, traffic moves through a junction never designed to honour trees. The High Road, Seven Sisters Road and Broad Lane pull vehicles around Page Green. Shops change hands. New communities add languages, food and worship to Tottenham’s streets. The trees are no longer a distant marker seen across fields. They are a small insistence within the city.
Below ground, London Transport has already translated them into another material.
The first section of the Victoria line opens on 1 September 1968, running from Walthamstow Central to Highbury & Islington and serving Seven Sisters. It is London’s first entirely new Underground line for more than half a century: fast, automatic and deliberately modern.7
Yet its designers do not erase local memory in the name of uniformity.
Each Victoria line station receives a distinctive tile motif connected to its name or neighbourhood. At Seven Sisters, Hans Unger designs a repeated image of seven trees. Blue trunks and branches spread across the panel in a compact grove. The picture is simple enough to recognise from a moving train and specific enough to return the station to Page Green.8
The oldest element in the new railway is not structural.
It is the story.
Passengers descending to the platforms encounter seven stylised trees that cannot die of disease, need no pruning and never outgrow the wall. Ceramic becomes a second form of replanting. The image fixes the number even as the living group above continues to change.
There is an irony in this durability. The railway tile is less alive than the hornbeams but more stable. The actual trees can be damaged, replaced or forgotten behind traffic. Underground, the motif repeats itself with mechanical confidence.
The station has also changed around the name. Surface trains now form part of London Overground. The Underground and railway platforms connect routes built nearly a century apart. Entrances open onto a neighbourhood whose density would have astonished anyone using Page Green as a rural landmark. But the words announced on both systems are still those of the trees.
Seven Sisters is often heard before it is seen.
It appears on departure boards, bus blinds, route maps and recorded announcements. To many travellers the phrase suggests women rather than vegetation. This is the name’s advantage. It creates a question. Stations called after kings, roads or districts can pass without resistance. Seven Sisters sounds like the beginning of a story.
The answer is not one story but a sequence of substitutions.
The original elms, if they were elms, are gone. The central walnut is gone. The first planters, if there were seven sisters, cannot be identified. The road has outlived the landscape through which it was cut. The station has outlived railway companies. Even the trees planted to preserve the trees have required replacement.
Nothing at the origin remains unchanged.
And still the name is unusually faithful.
It preserves the number. It preserves the location. It preserves the idea that a group of trees matters enough to be remade. Every replanting accepts loss while refusing disappearance. The tradition does not depend upon an unbroken organism. It depends upon a community recognising the shape of what has gone.
Leave the station by the High Road and walk towards Page Green.
The journey is short, but it reverses nearly two centuries of naming. You move from the station to the road, and from the road towards the trees that supplied both. The hornbeams stand in their circle, successors rather than survivors.
Do not ask which one is the original.
That is the wrong question.
The original achievement was never that seven particular trees lived for ever. It was that Londoners kept noticing when they did not.
Notes and Sources
London Borough of Haringey, “The Seven Sisters”. The council’s account, based on material from Bruce Castle Museum and Archive, describes the ring of trees, the competing origin traditions, the c.1818 engraving and the documented replantings of 1886, 1928, 1955 and 1996.↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London, volume 3, “Tottenham”, records the conspicuous circular clump of elms known as the Seven Sisters. Later nineteenth-century accounts repeat the association between the trees at Page Green and the local name, but do not establish the identity of seven original planters.↩
A. P. Baggs et al., “Tottenham: Communications”, A History of the County of Middlesex, volume 5. Seven Sisters Road was constructed in 1832 to improve access between Tottenham, Islington and western approaches to London.↩
A. P. Baggs et al., “Tottenham: Growth before 1850” and “Tottenham: Growth after 1850”, A History of the County of Middlesex, volume 5, on the expansion of building, population and transport around Page Green and Seven Sisters.↩
M. E. Quick, Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: A Chronology, 5th ed. (Railway and Canal Historical Society, 2019), entry for Seven Sisters. The Great Eastern Railway station opened on 22 July 1872.↩
London Borough of Haringey, “The Seven Sisters”. The same ceremonial spade was used for successive plantings and is held by Bruce Castle Museum and Archive.↩
Transport for London, “Victoria line celebrates 50 years of serving London”, 30 August 2018. The first section opened on 1 September 1968 between Walthamstow Central and Highbury & Islington.↩
London Borough of Haringey, “The Seven Sisters”, and London Transport Museum, platform tile motif at Seven Sisters station. Hans Unger designed the seven-tree motif for the Victoria line station.↩