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The Times Magazine 45houses and collections,” she says. “I’ve spent
more than any previous director-general. We
have more visitors to our country houses than
we’ve had before because we’re working really
hard. I’m passionate about getting people into
our houses.”
She adds, “It’s not a zero sum game...
I don’t want to take anything away. I want
to add and enrich.”In March last year, the Charity Commission
rejected a complaint that the Trust had
breached its charitable status by publishing
its slavery report.
Last October, at the Trust’s annual general
meeting in Harrogate, the Restore Trust
insurgency backed 6 candidates for election to
the 36-member council. Three were elected, but
one disassociated himself from Restore Trust
and another was backed by the Trust as well.
McGrady also cites an internal survey
showing that only 12 per cent of the Trust’s
members felt let down or disappointed by the
slavery report. “It was a really small number.”
She believes the worst is now past, and
while Covid nearly bankrupted the Trust it
has proved an unexpected boon in another
sense. The public could not visit its stately
homes during the lockdowns but it flocked
to places like Snowdonia, Exmoor and the
Peak District in record numbers. “People
took advantage of our open spaces in their
millions,” she says. “We saw numbers at our
outdoor sites that we’ve never seen before.”
They parked badly and dropped litter but,
“I was absolutely thrilled because an awful
lot of people came to us for the first time.”
McGrady believes the Trust really proved
its worth during the pandemic, and says that
is reflected in the statistics. During the past
financial year it raised a record £108 million
in donations. Membership has rebounded
from 5.3 to 5.72 million, and should reach
a record 6 million within a year. “For all
the letters of criticism we got, we also gotbagfuls of letters saying how grateful people
were to the Trust throughout Covid, that we
brought them sanity and solace and a sense of
escape,” she says
She believes her efforts to reach out
beyond the Trust’s traditional base and appeal
to city dwellers were vindicated by Covid.
“The vast majority of our members are really
happy with the line of travel. That’s why
they’re joining. That’s why they’re maintaining
their support and giving us their money... We
have to change carefully, but we have to keep
changing because the demographics of this
country are changing.”
The Trust is now pressing ahead with
its plans for carbon neutrality and green
corridors. It is seeking greater diversity in
its workforce and membership, although
McGrady admits it has a long way to go. And
it is trying to broaden its appeal with city-
based projects like the restoration of the
Victorian Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham,
and developing or protecting green spaces
in cities from Newcastle and Nottingham to
Bournemouth and Plymouth.
From Liverpool, McGrady and I drive
to another such project in the old industrial
heartland of Manchester. There, in Castlefield,
the Trust has enlisted the support of various
local partners to convert a long-abandoned
Victorian railway viaduct into an urban
“sky park” – a smaller version of New York’s
High Line.
“We’re bringing something into the heart
of the city,” McGrady says proudly as we
watch workmen laying paths and planting
trees between the viaduct’s rusty steel girders.
“If we want to reach more people we have to go
to where they are... People are realising there’s
more to the National Trust than country
houses, important as country houses are.”
Mancunians are evidently delighted.
Of the 330 replies to a public consultation
exercise the Trust conducted, all but one
backed the project. n‘TO REACH MORE PEOPLE, WE HAVE TO GO TO WHERE
THEY ARE. WE’RE MORE THAN COUNTRY HOUSES’
MAKE-UP: ETTI PEREZ AT CREATIVES AGENCY. GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY
OLD
National Trust’s properties – “essentially, The Trust’s Dyrham Park, near Bath
a piece of desk research that would inform
what comes next”. Properties such as Dyrham
Park in Gloucestershire, which were built with
the proceeds of slavery, would include that
information in their displays. Properties whose
links to slavery or imperialism were marginal
probably would not.
McGrady regrets only the timing of the
report. It had actually been commissioned
in September 2019 and was not a response to
the BLM protests, she says. Moreover, given
the Trust’s financial crisis, “I had so many
other things to worry about that we didn’t
have the capacity to cope with the media
storm... In a normal world I’d have had time
to help people understand why we were doing
it – the relevance of it, why it’s not criticism,
why it’s important to tell the whole history
of our places.”
Asked why the report attracted such flak,
McGrady exclaims, “Oh, I’d love you to tell
me that, because every other organisation has
been doing this work. English Heritage has been
doing it for years. Kew Gardens was doing it
at the same time. Every museum out there is
doing this work.”
She thinks one problem was that the report
challenged the idealised view of English stately
homes portrayed in television costume dramas
such as Downton Abbey. For traditionalists,
the National Trust “epitomises what a lot
of people consider to be the halcyon days of
Britain”, and “anything that vaguely poked at
that” was bound to upset them.
McGrady also believes the Trust was
caught in a “vortex” of wider issues including
Britain’s political polarisation following Brexit,
the BLM protests, Covid grumpiness and the
way that newspaper stories about the Trust
attract readers because of its size and iconic
status. “It was not just what we did that vexed
people,” she says.
She flatly denies the Trust has become
woke. “It’s such a ridiculous term, wokery. No
one has yet defined what they mean by woke.
I’m interested in bringing nature, beauty and
history to the nation, and I don’t even know
what ‘woke’ means in that context.”
She flatly denies that the Trust is dumbing
down. “Absolutely not,” she says. “This is one
that really does wind me up because there’s
some sort of assumption that because you’re
trying to reach different audiences you have
to dumb down. Where’s the evidence behind
that? We have more curators than five
years ago. We do more research than we
did before. We’re really committed to an
in-depth understanding of our history. That’s
the opposite of dumbing down.”
And she refutes the accusation that the
Trust is focusing on outdoor spaces and city
dwellers at the expense of its stately homes.
“Two thirds of our spend goes on our countryA new urban Trust project: Castlefield Viaduct, Manchester