In 1945, as the Second World War drew to a close, Clandon Park was in a sorry state. The house had for centuries been the country seat of the Onslow family, Surrey bigwigs with a long record in national politics. It was an early Georgian mansion in the Palladian style, an uncompromising, rectangular block of brick and stone, designed by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni. During the war it was used as a warehouse for public archives. The glorious interiors succumbed to damp and rats, the gardens were overgrown and the windows shattered by bomb blasts. The Earl of Onslow died a month after the war ended. His heir returned from a German prisoner of war camp to find that his horses had been put down for lack of food. “How are the mighty fallen,” remarked a former servant when she visited the house.
Scenes like this played out across the country in the Forties as the long twilight of the British aristocracy plunged into a gloomy dusk. Hundreds of stately homes were demolished or converted into hotels and flats, their owners faced with crippling taxes and lacking the means to repair or maintain them. It was a busy time for James Lees-Milne, the Country Houses Secretary at the National Trust. His diaries show him travelling the country and meeting with families who saw in the Trust the last hope of saving their homes. Everywhere he found the forlorn signs of a dying order: an old man giving the last tour of his gardens; a Viscountess scrubbing the floor of her servantless kitchen; unheated rooms under the “mournful, reproachful gaze of dozens of forgotten ancestors on the walls”.
The Trust wanted to prevent important buildings and landscapes from perishing with the hierarchy that had sustained them. Not every house met Lees-Milne’s aesthetic standards — “A horrible property. I hope it gets bombed,” he writes of one in Kent — and they had to be donated with assets or capital to pay for their upkeep. But dozens were accepted in the following years and decades, among them Clandon Park, transferred to the Trust in 1956. It was a peculiarly British compromise. The country’s leading families were able to preserve the symbols of their former prestige, and many of them stayed as tenants in their ancestral homes. In return, these were formally recast as the common inheritance of the nation. Commoners could stroll in their grounds, marvel at their collections, and nose around their servants’ quarters.
The country house survived as an emblem of enduring Englishness, and it gave the National Trust something of the same familiar, steadfast quality. It is thanks in significant part to these polite artefacts that the Trust membership ballooned from around 7,000 in 1945 into the hundreds of thousands by the Sixties. In 2017 it reached five million. But this year, as the charity marks its 130th anniversary, it appears to be losing faith in its most recognisable asset.
Clandon Park was gutted by fire in 2015. The Trust initially committed to restoring the property, but in 2022 it reversed course, claiming the damage was too great. Instead, it wants to fashion the burned-out shell of the building into a different kind of tourist attraction, installing glass walkways, a new roof and a café. The decision has appalled many lovers of architectural heritage and craft, who insist that restoration is possible. Especially painful is the loss of Leoni’s Marble Hall, a dramatic, lavishly ornamented room at the heart of the house. The stucco ceiling by Giuseppe Artari, teeming with three-dimensional figures and motifs, was a masterpiece in its own right.
The Georgian Group has appealed against the Trust’s plans, and is now waiting to hear whether Angela Rayner, the housing and communities secretary, will agree to reconsider. But the case is already tangled up with a wider set of concerns. “You get the impression they’re well rid of places like Clandon,” says Caroline McAslan, a former volunteer at two National Trust properties. Aslan was also active in the volunteers’ association. She gave up her responsibilities some years ago, out of “frustration with the direction the Trust was taking”. She had observed a shift in the institution’s priorities. “It’s now nature, beauty, and then history,” she says, referring to a slogan frequently used by the Trust. “The houses come in right at the bottom.”
The Trust, which is one of the UK’s biggest landowners, has ambitious plans for nature restoration on its 10,000 square-mile estate; these include planting trees, rewilding land, and changing farming practices. It has also been focusing on social justice initiatives, and on appealing to different audiences, especially urban ones. The Trust has pledged to help 100 towns and cities expand their green spaces, and is partnering with Mind, a mental health charity, as part of its plans for “ending unequal access to nature”.
Meanwhile, the Trust has been looking at its houses with a critical eye. In 2020, it published a bitterly contested report tying its properties to slavery and colonialism, and further projects on these themes have followed. “I think some people would like us to feel more guilty than we should be,” says McAslan of the Trust’s approach to history. It seems unlikely that members who pay almost £100 annually to visit historic buildings were unaware of the darker aspects of their provenance. Clandon Park was probably paid for with the wealth of Elizabeth Knight, who inherited wealth from merchants operating in Jamaica. There is no evidence that this influenced the Trust’s decision not to restore it, though before that decision was announced, a headline on the charity’s website referred to the house as “built on the profits of slavery”.
What is certain is that the Trust’s search for new audiences is changing its attitude to houses. A leaked internal presentation, also in 2020, proposed a “revolutionary” shift away from “the English Country House as a distinctive part of our national heritage”. It called instead for an “audience-led approach” that would make the houses “useful for as many people as possible”. In practice this has meant that, while a number of houses are still presented in a “traditional” way, others are being refashioned with gimmicks and leisure facilities. Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, for instance, was turned into a “Children’s Country House” with neon signs, a disco, and speech bubbles next to portraits. During the Trust’s post-pandemic layoffs, the experienced curator Andrew Loukes was made redundant because he lacked the ability to “attract new and different audiences”.
Jeffrey Haworth, who was a historic buildings representative at the Trust for 22 years, tells me how the curatorial direction has changed. “Instead of protecting the aesthetics and character and architectural importance of the country houses, it’s all about interpreting things.” Rooms have been insensitively repainted, baubles hung from ceilings, and “modernistic intrusions” such as glass-walled restaurants added to Grade I-listed buildings. According to Haworth, the problem is that “the vital post is missing” in the senior management, namely the post of Historic Buildings Secretary. This may have proved decisive at Clandon Park, where the director responsible for the building’s fate “was bamboozled into believing it couldn’t be restored”, Haworth believes. “He simply wasn’t equipped to make the decision, and yet he had to because there was no one else.”
All this is suggestive of the Trust’s priorities. Haworth notes that under Helen Ghosh, director general at the charity until 2018, there was a feeling “that country houses were wicked, were not the Trust’s core purpose”. Similarly, McAslan says of the current director general, Hilary McGrady, “I don’t think she likes big country houses.” When I asked the National Trust about their approach to houses, they replied that “we will continue to conserve our national heritage to a high standard while looking to balance the significance of our places and collections — and how we look after them — with the public benefit they offer.”
“You get the impression they’re well rid of places like Clandon.”
It is difficult to gauge the extent of the discontent at the Trust. The membership has dipped to 5.38 million, from a peak of 5.95 million in 2019-20, and volunteer numbers have dropped slightly over the same period. But there could be other reasons for this. The Trust’s governing council claims a democratic mandate, yet it has undermined its credibility by introducing a digital voting system, “Quick Vote”. This inevitably makes participation difficult for older people, who make up a big proportion of the membership, and tilts the scales by inviting voters to endorse the management’s approved candidates and resolutions — but not the alternatives —with a single click. Restore Trust, a movement established in 2020 to contest changes at the charity, says its own donors number “in the thousands.”
The recent tensions do raise some fundamental questions, though. Is the Trust’s first duty to the public, or to the places it cares for? Does it exist to conserve beautiful and significant things, or to make them serve a greater number of people? McGrady says that she wants the charity to “go back to our roots” by focusing on nature and inclusion, referring to the Trust’s origins in the 1890s with campaigns for public access to rural landscapes and green spaces in towns. Yet the implication that country houses were a later add-on is slightly misleading. Founders Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter were advocating for architectural conservation before they even formed the Trust, and the organisation acquired historic buildings from the start. People had been visiting great houses in large numbers since the mid-19th century, as the Romantic ethos of that era had already identified these structures as remnants of a fast-disappearing world. In an age of industry and foreign competition, ownership of agricultural land was no longer a secure basis for financial and political power.
The situation became more urgent after the First World War, when estates were left without heirs or struggled with large increases in death duties. The rise of mass democracy made the landed class an obvious target for taxation, with politicians eager to demonstrate fairness and to raise funds for social spending. Many grand families could no longer afford to keep their mansions running. As much as a quarter of England’s land was sold in four years after 1918, and old manor houses began to be demolished in their hundreds. Some were bought by Americans and reassembled across the Atlantic, a sign of the wealth and power that was draining away from Britain to the United States.
Still, the Trust’s growing involvement with stately homes from the late-Thirties brought contradictions. The group became, as the historian Adrian Tinniswood has written, “a curious alliance of conservatives and radicals… which could number socialists and the nobility among its ranks”. Although it was not immediately obvious, two contrasting moral visions had taken root. One was primarily interested in equality and social progress, while the other saw the conservation of the nation’s heritage as a sacred duty in its own right. The former tended to emphasise nature and public access, the latter countryside and houses. As Lees-Milne wrote of his calling to save important buildings: “My loyalties were to the houses, the families and the National Trust (which I regarded as an instrument of the others’ preservation) in that order.” He makes no mention of the public.
By the mid-Sixties, the cracks had begun to appear. Conrad Rawnsley, grandson of one of the Trust’s founders, launched an agenda that closely anticipated what we are seeing today. He led a successful environmental campaign, Project Neptune, which raised millions in donations, allowing the Trust to acquire hundreds of miles of coastline. He also tried to instigate a members’ revolt against what he saw as an excessive reverence for stately homes. “Should all the great country houses be shown as museums, or should some of them play a more active part in the life of the community?” Rawnsley asked. Through the Eighties and Nineties, similar divisions appeared over hunting and military bases on Trust land.
So the Trust’s activist approach is not entirely new, but it suffers contradictions of its own. As the clumsy interventions at historic buildings show, there is a point at which the effort to reach new audiences ruins the thing you are trying to share. To say that country houses should be for everyone is like arguing that operas should be rewritten for rap fans, or that chess needs to become more like skateboarding. If a diverse society means anything, it’s that people have different tastes. Another problem is that the supposed democratisation of the country house appears to be an entirely top-down project. It is not as though these places had to change to stay popular; the Trust’s membership grew over the 2010s, as did visits to heritage sites more generally. Thanks no doubt to productions like Downton Abbey, the allure of aristocracy, and interest in how people lived in the past, remain strong.
Judging by its recent schemes and announcements, the Trust has become carried away in its desire to wrap the whole nation in its loving embrace. This is heritage and nature viewed through the lens of public service delivery; a vision of an NHS for Britain’s soul. The charity’s head of communications places it among those institutions which seek to “apply expertise”, “make decisions to benefit society as a whole”, and through their benign neutrality, “act as roadblocks to extremism”. These may be laudable aims, but they suggest that social purpose comes before specific roles and responsibilities, whether addressing the concerns of the 1,300 tenant farmers on National Trust land, or using the restoration of Clandon Park as an opportunity to train craftsmen and other specialists.
“Does it exist to conserve beautiful and significant things, or to make them serve a greater number of people?”
The Trust is also creating the impression that there is something inadequate about its existing audience, which seems unwise for an organisation that depends on membership fees and the unpaid labour of volunteers. One former volunteer of 15 years, who asked to remain anonymous, tells me that the Trust’s paid staff and management treat contributions like his as disposable. “Many people gave years, some decades, only to be cast aside by work-shy selfish ideologues.” In this and other interviews, it was clear that workaday frustrations involving timetables and admin burdens are compounded by a more general sense that the ideals of the institution have changed.
I did find that, among most of its critics, there is still a deep loyalty to the Trust, and a willingness to acknowledge good work where it is being done. Unsurprisingly though, those who commit their time and money to the houses regard them as worth preserving not only to be useful to others, but for their own merits. As McAslan says, “volunteers love their work because they value the houses that they’re working in.” Ultimately, what is special about the country house as an institution is its combination of aesthetic and historical interest. With their gardens, artworks and architecture, they remain, as the Marquess of Bath said of his own house in 1949, “a thing of beauty in a drab and dreary world”. And the families which amassed these trophies were, in effect, the governing class of Britain for many centuries. Their stories are therefore worth telling.
Take the Onslows of Clandon Park, for instance. This lineage certainly included some wastrels, such as the 2nd Earl, who much preferred driving his carriage to contributing in parliament, and thought “a good veal cutlet on a plate” to be “a much more rational object of admiration” than fine artworks. But the Onslows also produced courtiers, privy councillors, philanthropists and decorated soldiers. It is the only family to provide three Speakers for the House of Commons. The 4th Earl was a governor of New Zealand and — perhaps more importantly for the average Brit — the founder of Battersea Dogs Home. His son made important discoveries in genetics at Cambridge, despite being paralysed in a diving accident. And Gwendolen Guinness, the Countess of Iveagh whose bequest allowed the Trust to acquire Clandon Park, was, among many other things, one of the first woman MPs.
When the National Trust took over estates from families like this, it helped to smooth the transition from an aristocratic society to a popular one. It proposed to the masses that, rather than simply forgetting the culture previously enjoyed by a few, they could regard it, in some sense, as their own. Of course many people had no interest in this final act of noblesse oblige, but a remarkable number did. One of the questions raised by the loss of a building like Clandon Park is whether Britain’s cultural institutions still have faith in this covenant with the past, and in the national story it was part of. They may believe that its time has passed; and yet, finding a new story to replace it will be no easy feat.
