Dealing with water shoots on an aggressively pruned tree

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I am new to gardening and the house I have just moved into is the first I have lived in with a garden.

There is a medium-sized tree in the garden, which I think is a beech but I haven't seen it in leaf yet. The tree has been aggresively pruned or topped at some point and it has hundreds of water shoots, some of which are over 5 ft sprouting from the branches which have been cut back. It looks very unsightly and in urgent need of pruning (see below).



I've been researching tree pruning but haven't managed to find very much information on dealing with water shoots. I did, however, read on one site that if you cut them off they come back every year.


How can I help the tree to recover and how can I remove the water shoots so that they don't come back every year?


Would it be best to get a specialist in or is this a task that a keen, but inexperienced gardener could take on?


Thanks for any advice.

 

Looks more like its been pollarded as a way of keeping the tree within bounds.

It does require a positive identification.

Trees are often pollarded for effect.

The branch structure needs reducing but these cuts will also produce more shoots. over a period of time, as the tree grows, the number of those new shoots reduce and the larger ones dominat but this is only as the tree gets bigger.

 

It kinda proves the point that some trees just get too big for their siting.

If you hard prune most trees you get this kind of response.
The harder you prune the longer the new shoots will be the following year.

I think I would try taking out about 50% of the shoots to where the growth started last year, and perhaps just tip the rest.
You need to slow it down, but its obviously a tree that wants to grow big.

As HBC says, a positive ID would perhaps help.