Who do you Trust?

Visitors to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset, a small thatched cottage built by Hardy’s great-grandfather, used to be met by a bare house and a guide book. Now they are greeted by a fire in the grate and a curator at the parlour table, dispensing tea and cakes and chatting about the author’s childhood. Those irritated at such intrusion can walk through the house and enjoy the garden undisturbed. Most are entranced.

When I arrived at the National Trust as chairman two years ago, I received two clear messages. One was to relieve its 330 houses open to the public from the ‘dead hand’ of the Trust’s house style, and the other was to cut the suffocation of its centralised bureaucracy. Both were born of past necessity — to rescue the houses from the parlous condition in which most had been received from often destitute private owners, and to put in place controls against runaway costs.