Just 10 minutes from my home, in a particularly undistinguished stretch, is a very ordinary street, Hornsey Road. Rumours of a Banksy appearing there brought us for a walk this morning.
Britain is full of odd little patches of lawn between blocks of council estates and roads. Hornsey Road is main enough to have constant traffic and buses trundling by. On the other side of the road the housing block is slap bang up to the pavement, too near. I've always felt sorry about that, and that I'd find it difficult to live somewhere where traffic and fumes are only a pavement away.
I was particularly struck by the gift of this artwork to such an area as this, truly a little forgotten corner, as if elevating the beauty and potential of all such hidden little corners.
The tree piece is so many things - pollarded branches frames the enormous splatter of green paint on the wall of the Victorian terrace of shops with flats above - just another familiar architectural feature of London after the bombing in World War II. My own home is like that, the abruptly ended terrace where decades ago a bomb fell, the site long filled in with a '50s council block.
So it's an odd little space. And the cropped tree, just undistinguished city furniture, now elevated to it's true significance, and probably international stardom.
The scale, the ambition of the green splatter is wonderful. It's the most perfect site-specific concept. It makes the tree sculptural, and it gives form and meaning to the paint.
Today the patch of pavement was filled with reporters and photographers. There were locals and visitors. What I particularly loved was that it brought out some local arty people, keen to talk, and delighted that for once something like this is on their doorstep. The neighbours of the tree, the people living in these unlikely flats, are being interviewed. The tree belongs to them, and to everyone.
The tree is commentary, it's an intervention, it's bold, beautiful, stunning, unmistakable. It's a happening.