‘Too much stuff’

Dr Bendor Grosvenor identified many of the problems currently coming to a head in the National Trust in a far-sighted article published in Art History News in 2015.

According to the previous Director-General, Dame Helen Ghosh, looking at fine interiors filled with pictures and furniture is ‘hard work’. Her proposed solution was to clear away furniture and pictures into storage and display only the small number of pieces that she thinks most visitors can cope with.

This approach appears to have gained traction in the National Trust in the last few years. John Orna-Ornstein, the Director of Culture and Engagement, has said that he favours ‘more museum-style context’, and he believes that most members also feel this way. It seems we can look forward to labels and display cases and the clearing out of clutter.

One of Dr Grosvenor’s correspondents sums up the essence of historic houses as follows:

‘The NT is responsible — in ‘trust’ — for historic houses: not historic architectural shells to shelter a select few pieces of approved art spotlighted as if in a museum, telling us what to look at, but houses with all their lived-in, accumulated-by-owners, even reacquired historic artistic furnishings including paintings, tapestries, woodwork, carpets, ‘stuff’ if you will, so all visitors can see and feel the history for themselves; something we cannot do in most museums however high their levels of artistic quality may be. […] The houses must come first, in all their higgledy-piggledy, very human glory, vanity, and ‘stuffiness’. After all, that’s who most of their owners were: that, too, is our history, whether we react in admiration, envy, fascination or dismay.’

Another recalls James Lees-Milne writing that the charm of English country houses was the “palimpsest” that resulted from many generations of ownership by the same family.

It is the ‘palimsest’ that keeps us coming back again and again to favourite National Trust properties. No matter how well we think we know a house, its many layers can keep yielding new discoveries.

Read more about John Orna-Ornstein’s vision for the National Trust’s historic houses here.