Hidden Treasures Of The National Trust

BBC Two May

Many people automatically associate the National Trust with days out to grand country houses. However, as this new six-part series demonstrates, maintaining such properties is just one facet of the wideranging work of Europe’s biggest conservation charity. Following on from the fascinating Secrets of the Museum, which lifted the veil on life behind the scenes at the V&A in London, Hidden Treasures of the National Trust similarly focuses in great part on the efforts of conservators and experts.

The sheer breadth of the trust’s activity is shown by the variety of properties and artefacts we see. At Biddulph Grange Garden near Stoke-on-Trent, for example, an ornate Chinese footbridge needs restoring. In suburban Liverpool, Paul McCartney’s childhood home, a former council house where the Beatles wrote and rehearsed some of their earliest songs, looks much as it would have done at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, not least because of the judicious use of stone-pattern wallpaper.

Other highlights include a chance to eavesdrop on conservators as they clean a model of a Normandy harbour used by Winston Churchill during the planning of D-Day. A rather bigger job is the renovation of novelist and garden designer

Vita Sackville-West’s writing room at Sissinghurst Castle near Cranbrook in Kent.

Each episode has a different regional focus and, as well as featuring the charity’s staff, introduces us to some of the thousands of hard-working volunteers who help to maintain its holdings, as the trust itself puts it, “for everyone, forever”.