EVER since its foundation, the National Trust has argued with itself and the argument is the same. Is it about gumboots or gutters, rolling acres or gilded cornices, Scafell Pike or Hardwick Hall? At the end of the day, the answer is always the same. Both.
The Trust faces a financial crisis due to Covid-19. It has lost £227 million already and must find £100 million fast. This re-opens the old wound, what are its priorities and what impact must they have on long-term strategy?
On one thing there is no argument. The Trust was founded first to conserve and second to present what is conserved to the widest public, in that order. Octavia Hill, its co-founder, wanted to bring to the urban poor ‘the life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air and blue sky,’ identified as ‘lands and tenements of beauty and historic interest’.
For the first part of its history, the Trust dealt mainly with saving and accessing landscapes, such as the Lake District, the Pennines and the Downs. Not until the 1930s did it move seriously into country houses, most urgently when they faced mass demolition after the Second World War. It now has some 500 properties, including more than 300 houses great and small open to the public.
Since a financial rescue in the 2000s, the Trust’s balance sheet has been robust. It needs no government subsidy and its membership has boomed, from a million in the 1980s to near six million today. But the houses are a problem. They consume two-thirds of the Trust’s £600 million budget and an increasing conservation bill, now an unprecedented £168 million annually. At the same time, the houses have stalled as visitor attractions, as numbers visiting gardens and landscapes soar.
Denne historien er fra October 07, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra October 07, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
