15 September 2016
Wool and Sand
Has the National Trust lost its way?
by J.R.Thomas
More trouble in Arcadia. Dear old Nanny is getting herself into more fights, fights that respectable elderly ladies really should avoid. But the trouble is, Nanny has shortened her skirts, slapped on the make-up, and is spoiling for some action.
Nanny is of course (and we thank the late and much missed Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, distinguished writer and architectural historian, for the so apt a nickname) Nanny National Trust. Nanny used to be more of an old colonel, tweedy and rather stuffy and devoted to furniture polish and planting trees. Some years ago the colonel got the push, and now Nanny is led by wild haired Tim (Parker), retired businessman, and Director-General (Dame) Helen (Ghosh), an ambitious and bright former civil servant.
Helen does not like titles and the trust has dropped the use of them, though a caller to her “Phone-ins to Helen” might ask why she took one if she is so uncomfortable about their use. Come to think of it, should not the Trust, devoted to conservation and preservation, be conserving and preserving the handles of those who formerly owned the land and houses now passed to its care? It seems a pity to have such a magnificent designation as the earldom of Mount Edgcumbe, or the baronetcy of Hyde Parker, and not make maximum use of it.
But conservation and preservation, there lies the rub. Conservation and preservation are not always friendly bed-fellows. Is it about preservation any more at all? The purpose of the National Trust, enshrined in the statutes which created it, is: “The preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest and, as regards lands, for the preservation of their natural aspect, features and animal and plant life. Also the preservation of furniture, pictures and chattels of any description having national and historic or artistic interest.” In other words, it was clearly about preservation. But preservation is presently an unfashionable and elitist cause, and the Trust has become, as we outlined in these columns last year, a huge mass membership organisation, the largest mass membership organisation in these islands, owning more land, more coastline, more large historic houses, than anybody or anything else.
One of the reasons it has so many members is that they get free access to many of the great range of properties and landscapes which it owns. That access does not always fit in with preservation of that which is accessed, or with the traditional activities which may be carried on there – such as farming, or forestry, or country sports. The membership prefers car parking and toilets and places to play frisbee and football, light bonfires, have picnics. The Trust needs public support and the public’s money – membership fees, £178m last year, were a third of the Trust’s income. But all that access and events to try to extract more money do not work well with preserving and with traditional ways of life. The preservationist wing of the Trust has for long been unhappy with this approach. Conservation, though, is a very fashionable and hip cause, less elitist, much more flexible, and with much wider scope for interpretation.
The previous Director-General, Fiona Reynolds, managed to keep both sides more or less happy. She was, one might say, the Tony Blair of the Trust, somehow keeping the thing pretty much together and pointing in the same direction. But if she was Blair, then Helen is increasingly looking as single-minded as Jeremy Corbyn, at least in the fevered views of the traditionalists. Helen’s mission seems to be to make the Trust achingly fashionable, adopting every modern philosophy and buzz-theme of the twenty first century. Greenness, sustainability, low or no energy footprint, rewilding, informality; that is what the Trust is about now.
None of that is discreditable or to be sneered at; but it can clash painfully with “preservation”. Last year the rows were about the country houses – removing the furniture so the houses could be “interpreted” as they were during the war, or providing bean bags so visitors could lie recumbent and admire ornate ceilings. This year has been marked by two controversies which really do strike at the conflict at the heart of the Trust; one tiny but symbolic; one very major which may lead to trouble for the governing Council.
The tiny is at first sight bizarre. Some thirty years ago the Trust was given the huge estate of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, run in a very traditional manner by Ralph Bankes whose family had owned it for hundreds of years. Mr Bankes was an ultra-traditionalist. He gave his patrimony to the Trust because he thought only they could ensure that it remained just as it was, feeling that even his son would not be able to achieve that. Part of the estate is the long and beautiful beach at Studland. On that beach sits a café, part of the estate and greatly loved by the Bankes family and by holiday makers and locals. The Trust has now announced that it is to demolish the café and build a new one away from the beach. Outrage, of course, not least because the old café is not operated by the Trust and thus provides greasy fry ups and mugs of tea; not paninis and a range of infusions. But what lies behind this is a bigger matter. The Trust is demolishing the café in accordance with its national policy to abandon sea defences. Studland beach is subject to erosion and has for many years been defended by groynes and blockwork to stop it vanishing. The Trust does not want that anymore; it is too expensive and beach preservation is unnatural. Let it go, let it be wild.
The major row is on the same theme. The Lake District is where the National Trust’s heart beats most strongly, the emotional core of its being. It was founded here; it owns huge amounts of land, mountains and farms. This summer Thorneythwaite Farm in Borrowdale was placed on the market, a traditional Lakeland farm with a beautiful house and complete with its Hardwick sheep. The farm was to be offered at auction in three lots – first the land, second the house, and then both together, to be sold as a whole if the offers for the whole exceeded the sum of the parts.
To general astonishment, the first bid for the land was way above the guide price – and came from the Trust. It then did not bid at all for the house and farm buildings which were sold to a private individual. Local farmers, who had hoped to buy the whole farm as a going concern were outraged – even more so when the Trust said that it had done this to prevent any other buyers getting a chance. As if this had not stoked the fires enough, it then issued a statement that referred to the wildlife and natural beauty of the land, and the need to manage the River Derwent, which flows through the farm, in a more natural way to assist with flood management in towns further downstream.
The Lake District is of course a surprisingly man-made landscape, created by deforestation and hill farming and even mining. Many lovers of the area think that is how it should be “preserved”, a tapestry of life based on family-run sheep farms and around an agricultural thread. But the Trust is moving slowly away from this and towards a rewilding approach – rivers encouraged to meander, regeneration of woodland, lower density farming with abandonment of some of the marginal fields.
This will undoubtedly be the makings of a wonderful row at the Trust’s AGM, which is coming up shortly. It all encapsulates the hub of so many debates in the world of conservation and preservation today, in arguments not just over land use or sea defences, but how we use buildings, how depopulation should be addressed, how we balance the need for low carbon energy against the appearance of our countryside. But perhaps the Trust needs to have a deep and wildly ranging consultative think about what it is really there for, even if that turns out to be something presently unfashionable and lacking mass appeal. Or has the time come to form a ginger group for the Preservation of the National Trust?
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