Clumber Park may be the ideal National Trust house—because it doesn’t exist. In 1938, a declining ducal family knocked down its pile and later sold its wooded estate to the Trust, which keeps it like an enchanted bit of Germany’s Black Forest, but in north Nottinghamshire. The result is a happy place to walk—think families with dogs, enjoying stalls selling herby toasted cheese sandwiches—without the awkwardness of having to work out what to do with a huge old building. No one needs to be dragged around a non-existent stately home.
I’ve sometimes wondered if exasperated curators would like to do the same with a few of their other lesser properties, but these days you can’t blow up a National Trust mansion, at least not physically—even if the metaphorical recent explosions linked to the culture wars are doing some damage. Thankfully, the point of the Trust is to protect everything it owns—for everyone, forever, as its motto runs. This is a national miracle. If it is here today, it stays, always.
Without the Trust’s protection, Clumber Park’s deep forest might have been felled and replaced with distribution depots serving the nearby A1, just as, without the Trust, all those other special corners of its holdings—from the little market hall in the Derbyshire village of Winster, which I pass most days, to the top of Scafell Pike—would be despoiled. Imagine an England that had spent the 20th century without the Trust to say no to uglification, and you’ll imagine a lesser land.
This promise of everlasting protection, though, is now the Trust’s challenge. How does an organisation whose founding aim is to conserve things also change, as it must? It has both to look back—to a time when the dukes of Newcastle-under-Lyme could afford to build Clumber Park and fill it with art—and forward, to a time when the act of being a duke, and doing dukish things with dukish arrogance and dukish amounts of money in dukish big houses, is thought by some to be akin to a crime.
At Clumber, where the old house is now not much more than some battered steps and outbuildings, the Trust has an answer: the land around it is there for nature, and for people to enjoy. At many of its other properties, most of which come complete with the usual set of unslept-in blue bedrooms, uneaten-in Gothic dining rooms and cold servants’ quarters, it has more thinking and explaining to do.
A small myth has grown up that the Trust began as a guardian of landscapes, and only later took on buildings as a sort of postwar tax dodge for the posh. In fact, it started by protecting both and has gone on doing so. But it is easier today to sketch out a credible future for the land.
“One cure for worrying about the National Trust’s future is to go to a National Trust property”
The collapse of biodiversity, along with the clarity of climate change, have handed Britain’s biggest single institutional landowner a job. Almost everyone can agree that its fields, peat moors and woodlands should store carbon, protect beauty and revive nature. The Trust was slow: it took Knepp, still a family-owned estate, to lead the rewilding movement; the management of its tenanted estates has lagged behind some innovative private ones. But it is catching up. Not long ago, I led an inquiry for the government into the best way to run England’s national parks and other protected landscapes, and the response sent in by the Trust was one of the sharpest we got.
From the 1960s, too, the Trust saved large parts of the coast from crass development. Now it should set itself a new mission: buying up threatened land around towns and opening it as wild green belts. This would be the single most exciting thing any organisation could do for wildlife, for pleasure and public health, and it is a job only the Trust could get right. Imagine a thousand new Hampstead Heaths, and more.
But what of the houses? For these the future is less clear. Over the last year there has been an overheated row about whether the Trust has become “woke” (see “The joy of lex,” page 41) or uncultured, because it has hired the kind of academics who write reports on the legacy of slavery who said predictably—and necessarily—awkward things. Spending cuts forced by Covid, which saw some curators lose their jobs, were taken as a direct attack on the Trust’s intellectual and cultural strength.
This has led to a much-publicised, sub-Faragist campaign to restore the Trust’s values, although to what seems unclear. The group at the heart of this endorsed six candidates in recent internal elections, of whom three won, although one of those elected disassociated himself from the group behind the campaign and none of them seem notably strident. The public seem unbothered by the squabble: membership is back on the up—heading fast towards an astonishing six million, after a drop when no one could visit during lockdown. Polling suggests that the Trust is trusted: about as well regarded as you can get in Britain, without being the Queen.
The house problem
But the question remains: what is the Trust to do with its houses? What should the properties be like a decade from now, or in a century, or in 1,000 years? It surely can’t keep all of them just as they happened to be decorated in the year they passed from their families, just as it can’t keep every bit of land which came with them farmed the same way. But every move away from their old state can appear to be an act of disrespect to the qualities that made them worth saving in the first place.
One cure for worrying about the National Trust’s future is to go to a National Trust property. They are usually hearteningly busy—and with families and young urban couples, not just grannies out for tea. There’s an unthreatening sense of joy shared between volunteers and visitors, a feeling that the place is on the side of simple, good and lasting values in a bothersome world. The Trust still does what fine institutions should do: embody collective, creative ideals beyond state control.
There is also a blowsy disregard for the rows that are supposed to be pulling the organisation apart. “Look out for the golliwog in the bath in the next room,” I heard one guide at a south Derbyshire house say encouragingly to a little girl the other day, and she dashed off to do just that. The Trust is not yet as cowed as its critics claim, or as it sometimes allows itself to appear. The fault with its research into links between its houses and earnings from slavery was not the commissioning of the work, but the sense that the Trust then had nothing else—and nothing positive—to say about the past. This, for the owner of the greatest collection of art, architecture, gardens and landscape on the planet, was absurd.
And busy though the Derbyshire house that I visited was, there seemed, to me, something cold at its heart. Not because of the extent of change—but its absence. It had become a shrine to a family who no longer lived there, preserved more or less exactly as they had left it in the 1980s, dimly lit, its contents—of modest artistic value—treated as important largely because they had once belonged to someone else. The volunteer guides were lovely but the place they cared for was a strange mausoleum.
Must the houses always be like that? A few days later I happened to visit another early Georgian Derbyshire house, of about the same size, but still owned by the family who built it. This house is rarely open to the public—that’s a win for the Trust, you might say—but I felt a confidence about its future. A sleek new kitchen filled what must once have been a bedroom. There were boots in the hall, along with a TV in the library and black Labradors on the steps.
National renewal
The Trust can’t fake the seductive charm of posh gun dogs, toffs in jeans and a chunky drinks tray under the van Dycks, and shouldn’t try. But it needs to do something to keep its places warm and alive. A few dozen of its houses are so magnificent, so artistically significant or so culturally original that they will always stand as themselves. No one needs to re-imagine Churchill’s Chartwell or Elizabeth Cavendish’s Hardwick Hall. But many of the others? They need lively flexibility—the sort of change that was always part of their private existence.
How can this be found, without offending the Trust’s promise to protect its holdings forever? It is not a question of endlessly interpreting the past through reports such as the slavery one, but of finding an active future. We could dream up ideas: some might even work. What about tech start-ups in the attic, sleepovers, digital remote-working hubs, music schools, residential welcome centres for new migrants, or good new housing to show that not all building needs to be urban sprawl (the profits could go back into protecting more land)?
All old houses have shocks of this scale somewhere in their history. Change makes their story interesting. But while a duke might once have knocked down his cosy Tudor home and replaced it with an icy piece of fashion-chasing Palladianism, the Trust can’t. It has to show a respect for art, culture and national history, pride in the places it cares for, alongside a spirit of daring. That’s asking a lot.
Is the Trust up for this? The blandness of the nice-but-patronising magazine it sends out suggests an organisation that doesn’t trust its members with complexity. You can see it too in the conformity of the Trust’s shops: all scented cushions, scarves and books chosen for their non-seriousness. Of course shops sell what people want to buy, and moaning about the fact that the tea rooms all seem the same ignores the fact that people like cream teas. But the conformity is strangling.
Each of these places was a home to real people—some extraordinary, some dull, all of them different. Every house will have felt different from every other. We can’t get those people back, nor can we duplicate the inhabiting spirits that lived there when they did. The ghosts cannot move back in. But nor is a great house habitable by an institution, and it sometimes feels like the Trust itself—with its logos, its lettering, its standardised fixtures and fittings and rules—is the new lord of the manor. Couldn’t we allow more freedom, the flexibility to play with ideas and uses, to create bridges from where we were to where we are? I dream of visiting a house owned by the Trust and not knowing at once who owns and runs it now; of letting the place overshadow the institution.
Freedom to let each house speak would mean giving freer rein to officers and volunteers to re-imagine, even mess around with things a bit. And the paradox is this: if the Trust were itself more confident in its judgment, more careless of what its critics thought, more intellectually alive and less trapped by what it imagines might be relevant, it would be freer to win back lost friends and gain new respect. It is looking for a new chair: the candidate who could do this best is Rory Stewart, the writer and former minister. The paradox of conservation is that aspic can be destructive.
