Anyone who has ever lived in Lewes won’t be surprised to hear that the East Sussex town has become the first in England to recognise the rights of trees. A motion, which was passed by the local council last week, declares that: “Trees have the right to flourish and to maintain their natural life cycles, ecological functions and evolutionary processes”.

Lewes has morphed into a place where your £5 oat-milk latte has probably been served to you by a trustafarian named Tabitha

Lewes has morphed into a place where your £5 oat-milk latte has probably been served to you by a trustafarian named Tabitha

Lewes is, of course, dominated by the Green party: 18 out of 41 councillors on Lewes District Council are Greens. The town’s well-heeled denizens have long prioritised ecological issues. Perhaps as a result, Lewes looks like a lovely place to live. It is also one of the strangest.

I spent nearly five years living in Lewes between 2014 and 2019, and I realised, from the outset, that I was looked at with scorn by the locals as a ‘DFL’ or ‘Down From London’. I deserved their contempt. Over the past two decades or so, Lewes has gone from being a beautiful and largely unspoilt town, once home to the likes of Virginia Woolf and, of all people, the American founding father Thomas Paine, to........

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