Whither the National Trust? / Sunday Telegraph

This was supposed to be a year of celebration and bold new ventures for the National Trust, Europe’s biggest conservation charity.

It was supposed to celebrate its 125th anniversary with, among other things, a reception at Buckingham Palace. It was supposed to achieve six million members. It was expecting a record number of visitors to its 550 houses, parks and gardens, 618,000 acres of countryside and 780 miles of coastline.

It was also launching a new chapter in its history, or rather one harking back to the core vision of its founder, Octavia Hill: restoring nature and providing access to wide open spaces for the inhabitants of Britain’s crowded cities. Preserving country houses came later – after the Second World War.

In a speech at London’s Barbican in January, Hilary McGrady, the Trust’s director general, unveiled plans to make the organisation carbon neutral by 2030; to convert 45,000 acres – an area one-and-a-half times the size of Manchester – to woodland by planting 20 million trees; to restore swathes of carbon-absorbing uplands; to clean up rivers and beaches; and to reconnect urban dwellers with nature by creating 20 “green corridors” leading from the hearts of towns and cities to open countryside. “We will galvanise the nation to care,” she declared.

The Trust has lost a third of its revenues – £200 million – during the pandemic. “Just about every aspect of our income base has been hit. Retail is down. Shops are down. Membership is down. Rent, fundraising – every one of them is down,” she says.

It is laying off 1,200 employees or 13 per cent of its workforce. “It’s incredibly painful… It’s awful. I can’t begin to tell you. I know so many of the people that are impacted,” McGrady says, her eyes welling up.

The Trust was within a week of securing its six millionth member in March, but has instead seen membership fall by 250,000. Many of its 60,000 volunteers are elderly, and some will never return as its properties slowly and gingerly reopen. Any building or restoration project that could be cancelled or deferred has been – 124 in all.

The sudden emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain this spring has had an impact, too.

The Trust had already commissioned a survey of its properties and their artefacts to determine which have links to slavery and colonialism. The report, to be published next month, will reveal that around 120, including Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire and Powis Castle in Wales, have what McGrady calls a “substantive connection” to Britain’s controversial past.

“Let’s be honest. The Trust has been fairly euphemistic around that,” she says. “We don’t talk about how the wealth came to be in most cases. For years we haven’t done that.” Henceforth “all properties have been asked to look at their collections and be clear and unequivocal as to where they came from and how they came to be in the property”.

McGrady likewise admits that the Trust must achieve much greater diversity in its workforce. Less than three per cent comes from ethnic minorities, not least because its properties are mostly in rural, overwhelmingly white parts of the country. She plans to set ­local targets.

She also wants the Trust to attract more ethnic minority visitors. “I’m determined to do something about it,” she says. “I come from Northern Ireland. I come from one of the most divided societies ever, so I’m quite passionate about finding ways to make excluded communities feel part of our world.”

McGrady’s upbringing in Northern Ireland means she is no stranger to adversity or, for that matter, to the restorative power of open spaces.

She was born near Lisburn in 1966, shortly before the start of the Troubles that blighted the province for three decades. She grew up under the “big dark cloud that stayed over our country for all those years, that limited thinking, that limited where you were able to go, that limited the friends you could have, that limited everything.”

Her school was segregated. Checkpoints and bomb warnings were routine. British soldiers detained her father, a builder, for two days after discovering fertiliser that he was delivering to a farmer in his van. McGrady herself once triggered a full-scale bomb alert when she left her school bag at a bus stop.

Nature provided an escape from that constant tension. She roamed in the hills near her home. She spent summers in her family’s spartan caravan overlooking Inver Bay in County Donegal. “There was a sense of freedom there that was simply not possible at home,” she says. “My love of the outdoors, once rooted, has been my refuge ever since.”

At art college she met her future husband, Frank, a Roman Catholic from the staunchly nationalist Twinbrook area of West Belfast. Her Protestant family was “devastated,” she says. “I could not have brought any worse version of a boyfriend home.” As for his family, “I definitely was not what they intended as a daughter-in-law”.

McGrady worked for Diageo, the drinks company, and then for an arts charity. In 2005 the Trust acquired ­Divis Mountain, which the Army had used as a surveillance post above West Belfast, and turned it into shared green space for both communities. Inspired, McGrady became regional director for what she had previously regarded as a “stuffy English organisation”.

In 2018 she became the first director general to have worked her way up through the organisation, the first not drawn from the great and good, the first from outside England and the first not to have gone to a top university.

Her upbringing has “fundamentally” influenced her approach to the job, she says. She wants the Trust, Britain’s largest private landowner, to be seen as more than just stately homes with tea rooms. She wants to broaden its appeal. She wants to expand city dwellers’ access to nature and beauty not just because it improves their health and wellbeing, but because they will not protect it unless they enjoy it.

“I guess I’m redressing the balance of nearly three decades of built heritage being the primary thing we’ve been interested in, to being actually nature as the thing that genuinely brings most benefit,” she says.

“Anyone living in a built-up area should within a half-hour walk be able to get access to quality green space, and you should be able to walk and keep walking out of the city to a designated area, whether it’s a national park or Area of Outstanding Beauty or whatever.”

Her immediate imperative is to stabilise the organisation. A handful of its properties have now reopened to restricted numbers of visitors, with mandatory pre-booking, one-way systems, no audio phones and the Trust’s volunteers instructed to talk less so visitors keep moving. But some smaller properties are too expensive to reopen under those conditions, while others have small rooms and narrow corridors – especially in the servants’ quarters – that make social distancing impossible. McGrady doubts normal service will resume before Easter at the earliest.

The Trust will also launch a television advertising campaign to raise funds this autumn, but McGrady reckons it will be two years before she can once again pursue the reforesting, river clean-ups, green corridors and upland regeneration that she foresaw in January.

She is not discouraged, though. On the contrary, she believes the lockdown has rekindled people’s appreciation of nature and highlighted their unequal access to it. “It’s helped the argument. It may have dented my resources and my ability to get on with it, but it’s raised awareness of it,” she says.

“We’ve had people come to our sites who would never ever come to them normally. You see in the news that they’re leaving litter and this, that and the other, but I’m much more excited about the fact that people are coming out and enjoying nature in a way they never did before.

“Even during lockdown, when people were using their hour of exercise, they were out in parks and using towpaths, so I think it’s unlocked a completely new perspective on why this matters.”

As for the Trust itself, “I’m really optimistic that we will come back stronger,” she says. “Covid has proven that people need access to green space, that they deserve access to a beautiful environment.

“So I think we’ll be needed more than ever, and that gives me a lot of hope that we will survive and we will thrive.”