Page Green Common is former common land was gifted to Tottenham Urban District Council by the Townsend Trust, the owner of the last manorial land in Tottenham. It was laid out in 1897 as a public garden by Tottenham UDC, who had commissioned F F McKenzie, then Superintendent of Epping Forest, to advise on how the various Tottenham commons might be improved. He recommended Page Green be laid out as a garden with a gravel circle and seats around the existing feature of the Seven Sisters trees, which originated as a circle of seven elm trees.

In 1619, a survey was made on behalf of the Earl of Dorset and produced a map of the Parish of Tottenham, Middlesex. South is on the top of this map - so it is upside down compared with most other maps. Hence Page Green depicted running left of the main road is shown on a modern map the other way around. The Seven Sisters trees are clearly shown.

The seven elms were planted in a circle with a walnut tree at their centre on Page Green.

In his early seventeenth-century work, Brief Description of Tottenham, local vicar and historian William Bedwell singled out the walnut tree for particular mention. He wrote of it as a local ’arboreal wonder’ which ’flourished without growing bigger’. He described it as popularly associated with the burning of an unknown Protestant. There is also speculation that the tree was ancient, possibly going back as far as Roman times, perhaps standing in a sacred grove or pagan place of worship.



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