The greening of a national treasure
The National Trust occupies a special place in the British landscape, often fondly summed up as custodianship of grand historic houses, with tea rooms serving 57 varieties of cake, and gift shops that do a peerless line in tea towels. These are all characteristics that Dame Helen Ghosh, the trust’s directorgeneral, insists she appreciates as much as any one of its 4.2million members.
Her own kitchen in Oxford, she says, couldn’t operate without its trust tea towels, while one major perk of her job is open access to scones. But for all her enthusiasm, this former top civil servant at the Home Office, who has been in charge since November 2012, is also embarking on a programme of reform that will go to the very heart of the National Trust’s priorities, and change the image we have of it.
Take the emphasis on historic houses. “If it absolutely came to a black-and-white choice between us acquiring another 18th-century mansion,” she explains, “or a bit of landscape that joined up two great habitats in, say, East Anglia, we might well chose the land.”
Her choice of words may seek to soften the impact, but the message is clear – a shift of focus from stately piles to acres of countryside and coastline. It is spelt out more directly in Playing Our Part, the 10-year strategy for the charity published at the end of last month.
The houses are still very much in the mix – with ambitious plans unveiled to spend £300million to eliminate a backlog of repairs – but dominating the to-do list is a striking commitment to better environmental custodianship of the trust’s 635,000 acres of countryside, and its 775 miles of coastline (roughly 10 per cent of the total in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland having its own organisation).
Specifically, climate change is identified as the biggest environmental challenge the National Trust is now facing.
At her desk in the futuristic Heelis Building, the trust’s ecofriendly but unlikely modern headquarters in a retail park next to Swindon railway station, Dame Helen stresses the evolutionary – rather than revolutionary – nature of her plans. “If you look at what we have acquired in the last 10 to 15 years,” she explains, her eyes flashing, “there have only been a couple of big places – Tyntesfield, a Victorian Gothic mansion outside Bristol, and Seaton Delavel Hall, a shell of a Vanbrugh house in County Durham.”
So is this the end of a line that stretches back to the mid-Thirties, when the National Trust began to step in to rescue threatened country houses for the nation?
“When there is a big threat,” she says, “and we think we are the only people who could seriously take on these places, then we would still consider them.”
So the door is not completely shut but, as she goes on to point out, the trust is already focusing its energies on a different sort of property. “It’s things like Beatles’ houses in Liverpool [Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s suburban childhood homes] or back-to-back houses in Birmingham. And our visitors are absolutely loving them.”
The process of change predates her arrival, but has undoubtedly been given new impetus by this pragmatic 59-year-old Catholic mother-of-two, who in her spare time, in best trust fashion, tends an allotment.
“On day one in the job,” she recalls, “I asked, ‘if our founders were here now, how would they say we are doing as custodians of places of historic interest and places of natural beauty for the benefit of the nation?’” The question began the process that resulted in the new strategic plan.
On historic houses, Dame Helen feels the answer is that the trust is doing pretty well. There is also now, she says, a strong legislative framework to protect historic buildings generally from the sort of threats to their survival that they once faced.
Presentation within the houses has also been updated. “We’ve done a lot in the past decade about taking the ropes down,” says Dame Helen, “but there’s still more we can do so our visitors don’t come away thinking, ‘how is this relevant to my life now?’”
That insistence on “relevance” is one of the inspirations behind the National Trust’s support for LiberTeas’ series of events in June, marking the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede. Working with parliamentary and various other bodies, the trust is inviting people to go to its properties with links to democracy, politics and politicians and to take part in debates and reflections over tea (and cake) about our rights and freedoms.
A similar enthusiasm for democracy is also prompting Dame Helen to ask how well the National Trust is serving the whole nation. “I do believe,” she says, “we have to think all the time about how we reach out the nation more broadly.”
An oft-heard criticism of the trust is that, with entry charges for a family that will leave little change out of £25, its properties have become the preserve of the middle classes. While Dame Helen points to the success in recent years of “heritage open days” when National Trust (and other) properties have opened free of charge, she wants to do much more to widen access.
“When we ask people the question, ‘is it the price that puts you off?’, the issue seems to be much more a feeling that this place ‘is not for me’,” she replies. “People who don’t come to our houses say that they don’t believe they will be relevant to their life. That concerns me.”
Which brings us back to the new emphasis in the 10-year strategy document on the trust’s land holdings, where annual visitor numbers are already 200million, 10 times that of the historic homes.
“If our founder, Octavia Hill, was here,” Dame Helen reflects, “she’d say that what she and the people I call her co-conspirators were doing in 1895 when they set up the National Trust was ‘creating green sitting rooms for the urban poor’. It was about open access to the countryside.”
So putting the focus back on to land as free-to-access “green lungs” is not a case of taking off in a new direction, but rather of going back. Except the threats facing the natural landscape are rather different now.
The effects of climate change on the landscape in particular loom large in the document. There is both a commitment to “restore a healthy, beautiful, natural environment” and a specific pledge that 50 per cent of energy the trust uses will come from renewable sources by 2020.
“Like any other charity,” explains Dame Helen, “we cannot be Political with a capital P, but that doesn’t stop us from campaigning on issues that strike at the very heart of what our charitable purpose asks us to do.
“All the practical evidence we have at the trust shows that the biggest challenge we are now facing concerns the threat to biodiversity and wildlife, of soils being washed into the sea.”
Some of this is down to wrong-headed intensive landmanagement techniques, she acknowledges, but much, too, is caused by climate change.
“We see parts of our coastline falling off into the sea. I like to show people a picture of a silverfish [a household pest]. They are insects that live under carpets and like damp and warmth, and we have a lot in our properties. They used to get killed off in winter because we had crisp, cold winters, but now they don’t.”
But what of the practicalities? Will, for example, the renewable energy target mean many more wind turbines on trust properties? The trust has mounted two high-profile – and successful – campaigns to stop them being put up near two of its properties.
“We will be meeting our commitment predominately from hydro schemes, and with biomass boilers at a number of our big houses,” she replies. “And we do have the occasional turbine. We do not object in principle to wind turbines in the right place.
“I think we object to 2 per cent of all wind turbine applications nationally.”
Many of the other 98 per cent, of course, are nowhere near trust land, but none the less, a delicate balancing act lies ahead for both the National Trust and its directorgeneral if it is to meet its new goals, play its part in the debate on climate change and retain the affection that makes it one of our great national treasures.