Looking after special places, for ever, for everyone.
Dame Helen, you are Director General of the National Trust. What is the National Trust?
The National Trust is an organisation that has changed a lot in the last one hundred and twenty years. Its purpose is to promote the permanent preservation of places of historical interest and natural beauty for the benefit of the nation.
What does this mean?
My point about change is that in every generation people have identified a different threat to which we have to respond. Our very early founders, for instance the most famous, a woman called Octavia Hill, was passionate about two things. First, decent housing for the industrial urban poor; so she founded a housing association. Second, that poor people needed access to green space. The earliest things the Trust bought were green spaces, spaces outside the town where people could travel to and be in the countryside. So in Southern England we own lots of land.
In the middle of the 20th Century, between the wars, in England the great country houses were being destroyed at an alarming rate, because of very high taxation on property and the fact that in many families the male heir to the property had been killed in the First World War. The then leaders of the National Trust, who were quite aristocratic, felt that they had to find a solution. This was the threat to which the Trust then needed to respond, so they made an agreement with the Government that the Government would write-off the tax bill if they gave the house to the National Trust. So we have now three hundred or so large country houses.
And do their families continue to live in them?
The arrangement with the owner depends on the deal done at the time. For example, Lord Sackville at Knole and the Dashwood family at West Wycombe Park had very generous arrangements. In a lot of cases representatives of the family still live somewhere in the house, and in others they have moved away.
Do people like to visit them?
We have 20 million visits a year to our houses, but 200 million visits a year to our countryside (insofar as you can measure its use). We own 250,000 hectares of land in the countryside, particularly in upland areas like the Lake District, Wales and Derbyshire. We own 700 miles of coastline, in order to give people access to walking along the coast. In Britain it is regarded as a human right to walk along the coast, so in the 1980s we launched a public appeal called Operation Neptune to raise funds to buy coastline. It is probably our most successful ever public appeal, because the British people love the sea.
How many subscribers do you have?
We have 4 million.
Their numbers are growing?
They grow by about 100,000 every year.
Probably the majority join because if they are members it is a very good deal, at £70 a year on average, to get into the houses for free and the gardens and park in our car parks. And about 30% are members because they really care about our cause. The importance of the cause to preserve beautiful places is felt more strongly by people as they go through life.
And after the War?
We continued to acquire country houses and started to acquire coastline as a result of Operation Neptune, but we also started to think more about how we could make what we do seem more relevant to ordinary people’s lives. So, some of the historic buildings we bought in recent years are not great country houses collapsing, but are more ordinary buildings, examples of houses that poor people would have lived in. We own in Birmingham three back-to-back houses of poor quality, small Victorian 19th century terraced houses, as an example of how poor people lived and we have recreated how they would have been. And then, in terms of historic connections, for example we bought the childhood homes in Liverpool of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, which are among our most popular properties. People love them and they are much visited and highly enjoyed.
And since you became the Director General, what are your major concerns?
Two things, the first is that I think about our founders an