UK’s tallest Christmas tree has 1800 lights and acts as beacon to Gatwick Airport

More than 1,800 lights have been put on Britain’s tallest Christmas tree, enabling it to be used as a beacon for planes landing at nearby Gatwick Airport.

View from teh 36 metre tall Christmas Tree, the UK’s tallest Image by Screengrab from PA video

Standing at around 110ft tall, the giant redwood at Wakehurst Place near Ardingly, West Sussex, is the UK’s largest living festive tree.

It was first decorated outside Wakehurst’s Elizabethan mansion 23 years ago, and was planted in the 1890s as one of the first exotic trees on the 500-acre estate.

It takes a team of arboriculturalists all day in two cherry pickers to put up the LED bulbs and remeasure the tree at Wakehurst, a National Trust site run by Kew Gardens.

Wakehurst’s director Tony Sweeney said: “The tree is approximately 120 years old and we’re expecting it to have grown around a foot. The tree has great vitality and it will continue to grow at an impressive rate for many more years to come.”

The tree is one of Wakehurst’s great survivors, weathering the Great Storm of 1987 and many other gales since, including Storm Barney this week.

Following the decoration and testing of the lights, the illuminations will be switched on on December 4 to mark the start of Wakehurst’s Glow Wild Lantern Festival.

From then, the lights will be lit from 6am to 8am and from 3.30pm to midnight every day, and stay on over Christmas until Twelfth Night.

To see what the view is like from the top of a 36 m Christmas tree, go to the video here