Trust in the future
I recently saw an interview with John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, in the National Trust magazine, where he discussed how he thought the trust needed to change. I am a big fan of the National Trust and the wonderful range of houses and gardens that they run, but I agree with him that the trust has an image of middle-class days out with afternoon tea, which it is proving hard to shake.
I suppose that a key purpose of the NT – to preserve for the nation the quintessentially English gentry country houses that were being lost due to inheritance tax and decimated families after the two world wars – does bring with it an element of aspirational tourism with a middle class flavour. These were the houses that appealed to readers of Country Life and Tatler who wanted to know how to style their homes in Hampstead or Newmarket, and who wanted to learn about the educated, leisured people who had lived in such elegant surroundings. Yet, the Trust is about so much more than this: they care for areas of outstanding landscape, not to mention working estates and farms, which carry out research and are ripe for outdoor activity; estate history gives us a wealth of information on the people who ran these houses, inside and out, both then and now; Trust sites actively engage with their local communities with both events and produce, and can be a centre of local history.
One of John Bird’s suggestions was for the Trust to engage more with London, after all, many Trust properties are very hard to reach without a car. Yet, one of my favourite sites in London belongs to the National Trust. 2 Willow Road in Hampstead is the 1930s house designed by the architect Ernö Goldfinger (eponymous inspiration for the Bond villain) and filled with art by the likes of Henry Moore and Bridget Riley, eclectic belongings, and his own designed furniture. It is a wonderfully evocative house museum and is often shown to you by the resident keeper, who is the best kind of guide. The Trust also owns other wonderful urban sites like Fenton House in London or the Hardman’s House in Liverpool. These are usually much less well known than places like Stowe or Hardwick Hall.
Likewise, Bird suggested the creation of a National Trust museum in London, featuring a changing exhibition of stellar objects from properties across the country. This is a version of the space at Two Temple Place that has been created as a venue for publicly-owned regional collections in London. I think it is a fantastic idea, not least because of the options which it offers for uniting objects from different houses to tell new stories. But I wonder in what kind of building such a museum could be housed? Any historic space would immediately reflect differently on different objects. I envisage a glass building, like one huge display case, a collection-size version of National Museum Scotland’s ‘Window on the World’ (about which I have blogged previously) which would allow visitors to walk around and read myriad different stories. A new Trust for a new age?