TRAILBLAZER AT THE TRUST
It is custodian of our most treasured historic sites yet it can draw affection and controversy in equal measure. As the National Trust celebrates its 125th birthday, we meet the woman brave enough to take on its top job
Our exclusive interview with NT director-general Hilary Mcgrady
Hilary Mcgrady can tell a story. As a child of the Troubles, she loved romping across the Belfast Hills, near the family home, with Shadow, her golden retriever. She’d get as close as she could to Divis mountain, then garrisoned by the Ministry of Defence as a lookout. “This sounds mad,” she says, with a dramatic pause, “but one day this army guy jumped out of the bushes. I’d scared the life out of him – and he scared the life out of me.” Twenty years later, after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the National Trust took over the land. Hilary, then a graphic designer, still lived nearby. “That was a real turning point for me: it became an open and neutral space, and all of a sudden I understood what the Trust was about. I thought, ‘They look after places that are important to people.’” Today, she is its director-general.
We meet at Rainham Hall, a Georgian house in Essex.
It’s not a conventional Trust property: the garden is looked after by the community, the rooms – furnished in a Sixties style – house an exhibition about society photographer Anthony Denney, a former tenant. Hilary is enveloped in a lipstick-pink armchair, mint-green cushions by her feet. She wears black jeans, knee-high boots and a tailored white coat, and sips frothy coffee from a reusable cup with the National Trust acorn.
As well as her Swindon flat near the Trust headquarters, where she spends a day or two a week, Hilary has a place in Northern Ireland. The family house, where she and her husband Frank, a graphic designer, have lived for 27 years, is an old lock-keeper’s cottage in the village of Aghalee in County Antrim. It’s also home to their children – Wes, Kirk and Tori (20, 22 and 25), and Maddie, their collie. The family’s 18 ducks live in the garden in a duck house affectionately called Duckingham Palace.
Hilary gets home most weekends. “People look at Frank and
I as if we’re slightly mad, but it works for us,” she says. During the rest of the week, she tours Trust projects. Last week she was on Exmoor, where a team is diverting a river to encourage wildlife. “I love being on the ground – that’s me at my best,” she says, with a smile. “My way of understanding how the Trust is progressing is to see projects in real life.”
Hilary, 52, became director-general of the Trust two years ago, having worked there for 12 years, most recently as its chief operating officer. The years before her appointment had been challenging for the Trust. The Archbishop of York had accused it of “airbrushing faith” after it dropped the word “Easter” from publicity about its egg hunts; Lake District farmers had accused it of “Mafia tactics” for buying land at an inflated price; while volunteers at a property in Norfolk had objected to wearing rainbow lanyards to mark 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
Hilary was unfazed, but she did doubt whether she should go for the role. “The odds seemed stacked against me,” she says in her Northern Irish lilt. “There had never been a non-english director-general; there had never been someone who hadn’t gone to Oxford or Cambridge; and they hadn’t appointed an internal candidate in 40-odd years. But I thought, ‘I know this organisation inside out.’ They know I will always want to keep moving us on. I’m not someone who sits around leaving things alone.”
ONE GIANT LEAP
After art college and a short career in graphic design (“I’m a big believer that if you’re not good at something, you should move on,” she says frankly), Hilary joined the Trust as regional director of Northern Ireland in 2006. Her first big project was the Giant’s Causeway. The Trust owned the stones, but the local authority owned the rest of the land. “I spent days of my life having cups of tea with councillors who loathed me and whose views I wasn’t too excited about either. I remember being at this meeting when one of them said the Trust would never be able to do anything because the council owned the car park. I said, ‘We’ll buy it.’ My team gasped. That unlocked it because I think they wanted money. I hadn’t a clue whether we could buy it, but we did,” she laughs.
The Causeway is now the National Trust’s most popular site, attracting a million visitors a year. “It’s been good for the Trust but, more than that, it’s been good for Northern Ireland. It will always be my proudest achievement, not only because of what we built there, but because I did a huge amount to get the warring factions to work together.”
Hilary went on to cover Wales, and then London and the South East. Today, her brief is bigger still. The Trust is the UK’S largest private landowner and farm owner, while it protects more than 500 historic sites in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It has about 5.6 million members. “People find it hard to figure out how one person can manage such a big organisation,” Hilary admits. “My job is about setting the right tone.” She loves the scale, but wants to allow sites a certain freedom.
“None of our properties stand still. They just don’t,” Hilary says. She wants properties to make the most of their “personality” and “their role in the community and beyond”, but is aware that her approach is not without its critics. Last month, she visited Dyffryn Gardens in South Wales. “The head gardener has this fantastic vision of what the grounds should look like,” she enthuses. “It’s amazing. The house is [she pulls a face]… okay, but there’s no collection there. It should only ever be a backdrop to the garden… It’s a good example of the Trust wrestling with itself because there will always be a group of people who will want to make that house into a beautiful thing in itself.”
GOING GREEN
For years, the Trust has been at the forefront of sustainability, but its own green credentials have also recently come under fire. Last autumn, members criticised it for partnering with Cadbury for its Easter egg hunts. (Cadbury’s parent company uses palm oil in its products.) The Trust has now said it will be considering other suppliers when the contract ends next year. Hilary goes on to point out all the green things the Trust is doing – 50 per cent of its energy is renewable, its takeaway cups all now have compostable packaging, all its shops will be free of single-use plastic in two years – and more.
What about her own travel? “I work hard to minimise that, but the Trust looks after three countries, so it’s important I visit them,” she says. “The most valuable thing I can do is to find ways to make the Trust greener. Our land has enormous potential for carbon capture, but it’s losing carbon because we’re not planting enough trees and we’re allowing diversity of species to decline. That’s where I can really make a difference.”
The Trust’s 125th anniversary year is the year to do it. “I want it to be much more radical about nature and the outdoors,” Hilary says. “This year is all about reconnecting with that. If people engage with nature, they’ll want to look after it.” May will see the launch of ‘Dawns’, when the Trust will open up rooftops on six of its properties at first light. Some of its sites may well also sign up to ‘No Mow May’, run by conservation charity Plantlife, allowing part of their grounds to grow freely to attract pollinators.
The projects are also designed to draw people of diverse backgrounds – another aim for the Trust. Hilary points out that a lot of sites, such as the Giant’s Causeway, are “open to all”, while visitors at somewhere like Osterley Park in west London are from all walks of life, partly because of its location. She adds, however, that many people still see the organisation as “white and middle class”.
“I’m all about actions, not words,” Hilary says. That’s why she’s so keen on Rainham Hall, where locals are welcome to use the garden like a park, and Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, which has been working with the community on what it would like to see there. “Once we would have closed it off, done a shiny new conservation project, made it look how it was before and said, ‘Haven’t we done a great job?’ Things have changed.”
Hilary admits that not everything the Trust does will be right: “The trend now is to batter anyone who in any way sounds hypocritical, but none of us is perfect. I am very passionate about being open.” There was some surprise at head office when she insisted on including her email address in the members’ magazine when she joined. “Having grown up in the Troubles, you cannot heal divides and get conversations going unless you are willing to be open and to be challenged. I would much rather lead an organisation people are passionate and vocal about than have to drum up support. Conversation is such a healthy thing. Bring it on!”
FOR MORE INFORMATION about the National Trust and its properties, visit nationaltrust.org.uk.
“PEOPLE TEND TO THINK OF US AS HOLDING PLACES IN ASPIC. NONE OF OUR PROPERTIES STAND STILL. THEY JUST DON’T”