‘Cancel culture? At least we’re not the National Trust’
English Heritage’s chief executive tells Clive Aslet how the charity has reinvented itself, with a growing membership and a renewed appreciation of the past
Despite the February cold, we are sitting on picnic chairs on the edge of an Oxfordshire field; Kate Mavor, brought up in Glasgow, now chief executive of English Heritage, doesn’t react to the chill. In fact, she’s smiling.
This is doubly remarkable because the organisation she heads has just received its final tranche of government money. “That’s it – finito,” she says. Fortunately, due to successful fundraising and a membership that has zoomed to a million, English Heritage – custodian of hundreds of historic monuments, buildings and places – appears to be in good shape. What’s more, it has come out of the pandemic seeming stronger than it went in.
Part of the reason for that lies around us. Despite the wintry birdsong and the occasional roar of a train at full tilt on the nearby railway line, this is no ordinary field; in it are the remains of North Leigh Roman Villa. Beside knee-high stumps of wall is a large mosaic, excavated in 1816, now covered by a corrugated iron roof – there were originally 16 mosaics here, but the rest disappeared as souvenir hunters removed tesserae in the 19th century.
Inside, a curator is undertaking a spot of “tile-slapping”: this, she tells me, is the technical term for carefully sponging off the hydroponic dust that will build up, even in a rural location. This must be done twice a year or the dust will bond with the surface of the mosaic and make it dull. Joining her are local volunteers, happy to brave the cold to help preserve and display a local monument. Volunteers were never welcomed when English Heritage was government-funded. Now, they are becoming its life’s blood.
Much of the credit for this transformation is down to Mavor. A mother with two children, who divides her time between the Welsh borders and London, she has a natural warmth, as well as a single-minded focus on the mission. Most of her week is spent visiting English Heritage properties, such as North Leigh. There are more than 400 of them, from the famous – like the Battlefield of Hastings or the Uffington White Horse – to others that are little more than bumps in the ground. Abbeys, castles, ancient halls, deserted medieval villages, 47 London statues, a Cold War bunker and 60 Roman sites, like North Leigh.
Until 2015, the government agency that cared for them – itself called English Heritage, confusingly – also contained what is now Historic England. Still part of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Historic England helps “realise the potential” of England’s historic environment, principally by stopping people from knocking it down through the listed buildings system.
English Heritage kept the title of the old agency, but was hived off. Government wanted to shed the responsibility for owning so many heritage properties. The new English Heritage, a charity, was sent on its way with £80million, which experts predicted to be woefully inadequate in relation to the costs of repairing a portfolio of fragile structures of immense historical significance. It’s the last of this money that has just been handed over. English Heritage must now pay its own way.
For seven years, Mavor has been the first and so far only chief executive of the new body. She had previous experience of rescuing cultural institutions from black holes, having come from running the National Trust for Scotland, a financial basket case until she took over in 2009. It helped that, after reading modern languages at Trinity College, Oxford (where, on her first day, she met her husband, the author Andrew Williams), she studied at the London Business School. Her career began as a graduate trainee at Thomson books, and progressed through various roles in publishing. She then set up her own market research company, worked as head of a language interpretation service, and, in 2005, became chief executive of Project Scotland, which encourages young people to work with charities – hence her sympathy for volunteering.
For her predecessor at the old English Heritage, the charismatic historian Dr Simon Thurley, the role was nothing but a poisoned chalice: he effectively abolished his own position when the amoeba divided. By contrast, Mavor reckons her job is the best in the world.
And she has a lot of fun in store for 2022. Apart from the need to get visitors back to the properties after the pandemic, there’s Hadrian’s Wall – 1,900 years old this year.
All of English Heritage’s 60 Roman sites across the land, including North Leigh, will be in celebration mode to mark the event. At the other end of the country from Northumberland and Cumbria, the gigantic triumphal arch that once stood at Richborough in Kent, the port from which the Roman army was resupplied, will be rebuilt out of wood. “It’s huge,” says Mavor. “Bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, I think. We’re recreating it for this summer. We also did an archaeological dig there last autumn, which was incredibly exciting. We have a new museum opening to showcase what was discovered.”
Clifford’s Tower in York is being reimagined. Previously, this early medieval castle was nothing but a masonry shell on a mound, muchloved by local people and surrounded by daffodils in spring, but rarely visited for more than 10 minutes. “It’s going to be transformed,” declares Mavor. “We’ve done this amazing feat of engineering by lowering into the centre of the cylinder a completely new platform: you’ll be able to see things invisible since the 17th century. And then we can tell the whole story in a more measured, leisurely way.
“Up at the top, you get a 360-degree view of York, with the minster at one side and the countryside beyond. The really magical thing is you can see nothing of this from the outside. Externally, Clifford’s Tower looks exactly the same as before.”
And yet, in this age of cancel culture, isn’t there a problem here? Clifford’s Tower witnessed some extremely gruesome episodes of history, such as a massacre of York’s Jewish community in 1190. Yes, but English Heritage isn’t tying itself up in knots over its interpretation of the past, unlike the increasingly woke National Trust,
‘We’ve recognised that looking after the nation’s assets has a really deep importance’
which has upset members, MPs and traditionalists by producing, in 2020, a shoddily researched paper into its properties’ links with slavery and colonialism, partly in response to the Black Lives Matter protests.
“We feel on quite safe ground there,” says Mavor, “because we have always relied upon scholarship and research as a starting point – authenticity is one of our core values. It’s always been in our DNA to research things really thoroughly. Black history is something we looked at, and as long ago as 2007 we commissioned research on the transatlantic slave trade links to our sites. We fold all of that into our stories.” There is another contrast to be made with curatorship. While the National Trust (which is “enormous compared to us”, she says) has been downgrading the role of experts over the past couple of years, reducing the number of its curators and specialists, English Heritage employs 11 full-time historians, nine property curators and 15 collections curators, as well as many site staff with history backgrounds. Not that she will be drawn into a rivalry with the trust.
“I’m full of love for it,” says Mavor. “I think what they do is amazing, but we both have our distinctive identities. They’ve got different origins as a charity to protect open countryside and coastline, before the country houses came along. English Heritage is really about telling the story of England over six millennia. We go deep into the scholarship.”
And she understands the challenges the National Trust faces. “It is a very broad church. They get so much interest because they have to please so many people. Anybody who attracts passionate discourse is basically engaging people, which is all good.”
The trust, despite its enviable endowments, was one of the first
bodies to call for public money to make good the effects of the pandemic. Successive phases of lockdown meant that revenue-generating properties couldn’t open. Wasn’t English Heritage hit equally hard? It was, and Mavor has been relying on government loans to get through; they secured a £23.4million Culture Recovery loan that they will need to pay back.
But there is another story. Smaller sites like North Leigh proved a godsend for many people during the restrictions. Visitor numbers at English Heritage sites shot up – and not just among those wishing to test their eyesight by visiting places like Barnard Castle. (Who would have thought Dominic Cummings might inspire a mini tourist boom?)
“Kirkham Priory, which is one of our absolutely gorgeous Yorkshire abbeys on the river, with 900-year-old walls… going there when the country was suffering all the uncertainties of a pandemic was very calming,” Mavor says. “This was here through the plagues, through the wars, all the upheavals of history, and it still stands. I think that’s why so many of our free and local sites have seen a lot of people. The connection with the past, the familiarity, the sense of belonging in your community – that’s really where we’ve recognised that looking after the nation’s assets has a really deep importance that we haven’t really seen society articulate before.”
Not only did English Heritage’s existing membership stay loyal during the Covid crisis, but another 182,000 people joined.
The pandemic also inspired creativity. “One of the team who wasn’t furloughed just worked solidly all through 2020, transferring our audio tours onto mobile devices. BYOD – Bring Your Own Devices – was the new thing.” Takeaway vans and mobile catering proved unexpectedly successful when the usual outlets were closed – a lesson for the future, given that, unlike the National Trust, English Heritage generally owns little land on which to build permanent catering facilities.
“Then we streamed the summer solstice. It was the most moving thing. People watched from around the world. It was a showering of love for Stonehenge – a real moment of ‘we’re all in this together, and the sun is still rising’.”
Stonehenge has, of course, been the subject of passionate discourse in recent years. A recurring question is why aren’t people allowed to stroll around the stones as they used to? “Because there’s 1.6million of you [visitors] every year, so if everybody walked around the stones, they would suffer,” replies Mavor.
“Also, a few people do behave badly and chip bits off them. We are charged with protecting the stones. However, you can get special access if you come before opening hours and pay around £30.”
And what about the long-mooted controversial £1.7billion project that aims to reduce traffic bottlenecks on the A303, includes a two-mile tunnel near the monument, and which has received strong objections from archaeologists, environmentalists and modern-day druids – who say it risks
‘We have always relied upon scholarship and research as a starting point’
damaging one of the most important prehistoric landscapes in Europe?
“We support [the project],” she says. “At the moment, it’s in stasis because the Secretary of State has asked for more information. There’s quite a long process.” Although in the span of the history over which Mavor presides at English Heritage, even a seemingly interminable planning inquiry occupies but an eyeblink of time.
While a family ticket to Stonehenge will set you back more than £50 (for non-members), there is surely an issue with sites such as North Leigh: they are free to visit. Doesn’t that concern a chief who has to balance the books, especially without state funding? Mavor sees it differently. For one thing, the enthusiasm of the volunteers at North Leigh has brought a reward, by helping to secure a £1million donation from the Michael Bishop Foundation, to be shared with Dover Castle, Hardwick Old Hall and Brodsworth Hall and fund conservation work. For another, free is good.
When Marble Hill, the Palladian villa built by the mistress of George II near Richmond, reopens in May after a £8million restoration (thank you, National Lottery Community Fund), there will be no admission charge. Mavor believes that takings from the revamped gift shop, guidebook sales and expanded tea room will more than compensate for the loss of revenue.
Forget that I said “king’s mistress”; that was the old-school way of telling the stories of Britain’s historical sites. “We’ve taken a completely different view and thought, ‘Hang on a second, who is this woman, Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk? Is there any more to say?’ Fantastic story. She was hard of hearing, she was abused by her husband, she became mistress to the king as a means of getting herself where she needed to be: independent. She then came into her own and held literary salons there. Alexander Pope was one of her regular visitors, he designed a garden for her. We’re bringing all that in to say that this was a really amazing person.”
The focus isn’t only on aristocrats. In this age of diversity, Blue Plaques (an English Heritage responsibility) are being erected to remember the Match Girls’ Strike of 1888, an early industrial action taken largely by teenage girls against atrocious working conditions in London’s East End, and a refuge for ayahs in Hackney (ayahs were nannies from the empire brought to the UK and then possibly abandoned). Landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson will be remembered with a plaque at her old home in Bloomsbury. Another plaque will mark the site of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ headquarters in Westminster. It’s all about telling the stories of London’s working class and the capital’s women.
“We’re always trying to find the stories of underrepresented groups,” Mavor says. On a Blue Plaque, there is space for just 13 words, which would leave precious little space for woke preaching. Thank heavens that’s not the English Heritage style.