Hilary McGrady, Director General of the National Trust (Image: National Trust Images/James Dobson)
In the archives at the there is a letter from the year 1900 that says: “I once saw Derwent Water and can never forget it. I will do what I can to get my mates to help.” It was signed “from a working man” and contained a donation of two shillings – five pounds in today’s money.
The letter was one of thousands sent in response to our first public appeal, to protect the West shore of Derwent Water from private development.
We had six months to raise £6,500. That was a lot of money in those days. Well, we raised far more than that, in just four months, via small donations postmarked in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds.
In fact, our archives are filled with letters like these. From factory workers to famous authors, generations of people have written to us to offer their time, money and support to help save something worth saving.
Together, under the proud banner of the National Trust, they have protected swathes of countryside from overdevelopment. They have put 750 miles of coastline – cliff path, golden beach and remote island – into the hands of the nation. And they have stopped the destruction of dozens of country houses, and with them, centuries of history.
Today we need to draw on that collective spirit again. Because the challenges we’re facing right now are on a different scale to those we’ve seen before.
Nature in this country is in crisis. Over the last 50 years, the UK has been stripped of so much that we find ourselves in the bottom 10% of in the world.
Sights that would’ve been considered unremarkable when I was growing up – a bug-splattered windscreen, scores of birds picking over farmland, hedgehogs in every pile of leaves – now risk becoming even rarer spectacles.
The escalating climate crisis is only putting nature in greater jeopardy, while making people’s lives more chaotic and more expensive.
What’s more, the fragmented nature we have left is not available to everyone. 38% of us have no green spaces, rivers or water within a 15-minute walk of where we live, and for people living in the 200 most disadvantaged urban areas, that rises to 97%.
Access to heritage remains unequal too. Despite history taking centre stage in public debates, and history podcasts and books booming, heritage funding has been squeezed and stretched for three decades. Many people don’t see themselves, or the things that matter to them, in the way we talk about history.
The National Trust is uniquely placed to help. So today we’re launching a 10-year plan to try and reverse those trends. Firstly, we’ll work tirelessly to bring nature back to our countryside, towns and cities, and make wildlife a bigger part of people’s lives.
We’ve just met our goal of restoring 25,000 hectares of land during the last 10 years – over the next decade, we’re pledging to restore ten times that amount, an area 1.5x the size of Greater London. We want rivers to be glinting with fish, bugs on windscreens, birdsong that booms from the UK’s 23 million gardens.
This is not an overly bucolic vision of Britain. It was like this – and it can be again. And it needs to be. We can’t have economic stability, or good healthy food, or clean air without nature.
Secondly, we’ll break down the barriers that stop people getting out into nature and close to history and culture. We’ll create more green corridors that thread through towns and cities, like at and we’ll give more people the chance to feel the health benefits of green space – starting today, with a new partnership with the charity Mind.
We’ll celebrate the stories and local histories that matter to people, like in Coventry, where we’re taking on our first property, the Charterhouse. And we’ll aim to foster that same spirit that inspired a nation to save beautiful Derwent Water 125 years ago.
If you’re visiting the National Trust, you can still expect the same world-class conservation, the same warm welcome, the same mug of tea and bracing walk. Our fabulous houses and gardens aren’t going anywhere.
But you can expect to see us trying different things and working in new places, with many new people. Nature, beauty and history belong to everyone – and that means taking them beyond the fences and gates of our own properties.
Starting 130 years ago, our founders fought to save the , the Cambridgeshire fens, the coasts of West Wales and the hills of Northern Ireland. The National Trust has never stood still, and we won’t now.
We’re more than up for the fight. But the sheer size of the challenge means we can’t do this alone. We’re going to need everyone to get their mates to help.
Hilary McGrady is the National Trust’s Director General and the new 10-year strategy can be found .