In Conversation with Anna Keay, Director of the Landmark Trust
Anna Keay is a historian and director of the Landmark Trust, a charity that rescues historic buildings across Britain and gives them a new life by allowing people to stay inside them. From remote towers to small coastal cottages, Landmark has created a unique way of experiencing the past - not as something distant, but as something very much lived in. Anna is also the author of several books on 17th century Britain, most recently The Restless Republic. We met to talk about crumbling churches, Spitfire pilots, the English Civil War, and why the light through a leaded window still matters.
Anna - you grew up in the Scottish Highlands. How much did that shape what you do now?
Like all of us, it's definitely played a role at different levels. I grew up in a really beautiful, remote part of Scotland, the West Islands. There were historic things all around us - I grew up in an old Victorian shooting lodge, which in itself is interesting. But of course, it's just your familiar environment, isn't it? So you don't necessarily look at it with those eyes.
But there is a most wonderful castle on the edge of the village I grew up in called Kilchurn Castle, which is one you always see on shortbread biscuit tins. And then when I was at university, I got a job as a guide at Brodie Castle, which I did for three or four summers. That was a wonderful environment to work in, and it gave me a kind of line through history, through collections and works of art, which I could understand and make sense of, and then compare other things to. When you've got your eye in with a collection of paintings and you know what something 16th century looks like compared to something 18th century - as is the case with knowing any individual place well - you've got a mental gauge to compare anything you later come across. Those places definitely lit a little flame in me.
You studied history at Oxford. Did that deepen the interest?
It did, but it was amazing - in retrospect I felt it quite soon afterwards - how little attention is paid, when you study history, to the physical remains of the past. Which is a kind of negligence, really, because they are just as real and legitimate and communicative as words, if not more so. On the whole you're being taught by people for whom that isn't their familiar ground, and so they tend to miss the opportunity to give life and meaning to things through the physical. And the physicality, I find, is such a gateway - to ultimately being interested in the history and stories, everything unravelling almost in the inverse way.
Your books focus on 17th century Britain. What draws you to that period?
I did my PhD on Charles II, who was in exile for quite a long time after the execution of Charles I and then came back. I got very interested in that period because there's such political upheaval, and so much was challenged and fought for. I've done a series of books ranging around it - a book on Charles II himself, then a biography of his son the Duke of Monmouth, a fascinating character who at 36 invaded England, the last time England was invaded from within. And then most recently The Restless Republic, which is about what it was like to live through the 11 years after the Civil War when there was no monarchy and the whole world order of the English royal state was completely disaggregated and dismantled.
My approach is really through the lens of people. Trying not just to write about what happened, but to get at what it felt like to be alive, to be part of those worlds. What was it to wake up in a world where suddenly the crown jewels had been sold, the royal estates had been put up for sale? If you lived in Lincoln or lower Somerset, what did that actually mean?
The Restless Republic feels very contemporary. Was it born out of the Brexit moment?
Very much so. Although I'd worked a lot on the 17th century, I'd always slightly skipped over the interregnum - partly because it gets treated as a bit of a historical dead end, since the monarchy is then restored, and partly because it seemed to be about lots of battles and Parliament and movements that all felt a bit incomprehensible.
But the Brexit campaign really struck me. There was this huge national schism, not just across political divides but within families. Very able political campaigners making the case for one side or another, and a real disconnect between what was promised and what was actually going to result. And it made me think: it's one thing leaving the EU, which was a big enough deal as it was, but imagine what it was like in 1649, when in the course of six weeks the King is executed, the monarchy is abolished, the House of Lords is abolished, the royal estates are put up for sale, the whole Church is disaggregated. To live through that, in an immensely conservative age. That's what I wanted to write about.
Let's talk about the Landmark Trust. For readers who don't know it - what is it?
The Landmark Trust is a British charity founded in 1965, at a time when listed buildings were being demolished at the rate of 400 a year in this country. Our founder, John Smith, formulated the idea of a charity that would save historic buildings from destruction or disrepair, repair them, and adapt them as somewhere people could rent to stay in for holidays or short breaks. Thereby creating something that was both about saving historic buildings and giving people really wonderful experiences of special, historically rich, unusual places - and where the money spent on renting them could help cover the costs and contribute to saving more.
He had this lovely yin-and-yang idea back in 1965. And you have to remember - now we're all used to Airbnb - but that was completely radical at the time. Among his papers, there's a wonderful document where he describes talking to the Georgian Group about his idea, and what he saw as their disgust that holidaymakers, the riffraff, might stay in these very special buildings. Anyway, it was a radical idea, but it's really prospered. We've just had our 60th anniversary, and we now have over 200 historic buildings all across Great Britain and one in Italy.
How do you decide which buildings to take on?
We assess against three basic criteria. First: is the building important? It has to be architecturally or historically outstanding - just because there's a lovely cottage that would be nice to stay in doesn't mean it's one for us. Second: is it genuinely at risk? If someone would simply buy it and repair it, there's no need for us to use our scarce capacity. And third: would it be financially viable under our model - which basically means, would it make a place people would like to stay in?
What we tend to get involved in are places that represent a liability rather than an asset, where there isn't any really viable option, and where there are usually complications to unravel. We might acquire two buildings a year, and then embark on what is always quite a long journey of raising money for each project before we can start work.
The Oscar Wilde point applies here - the price of everything and the value of nothing. The market value of these buildings is rarely commensurate with what it costs to keep them standing. We took on a building in Wales about 10 years ago, a fascinating medieval structure. We spent about four million pounds on it. It's probably worth less than a million. On any commercial basis, you would never spend that money. But that is precisely why it needs a charity to come in - because that is a situation in which the market simply will not, because the sums don't add up.
Can you tell us about some current projects?
We've got three wonderful ones on the go. The first is the South Tower at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire - an enormous historic house that was a great aristocratic home but fell on hard times in the late 20th century. We've taken on the very tip of it, which was the Marchioness of Rockingham's own parlour and related rooms.
One of the reasons I love it is that she, like a lot of women in history, is completely overshadowed by her husband, who was a great political figure, Prime Minister, very much a player in the highest political spheres of the late 18th century. But she was very much a player too. Her great chamber is covered in wonderful plasterwork friezes and carved marble reliefs, all very expressive of female agency, which is really interesting - and it's in very poor repair, the ceiling has collapsed. So we're fundraising to repair it, including reinstating that plaster ceiling with a brilliant traditional master plasterer who will work alongside apprentices, training the next generation in this very skilled work. That will make a little Landmark for two, completely separate from the main house, with its own bridge into it from the garden.
Then in the New Forest we are working on a Second World War airfield control tower. It's easy, when dealing with buildings at risk, to think about the things you already know and love, and not to notice what's going to be lost because you're not paying attention. And there are so many Second World War buildings being quietly demolished. If you had your back against the wall and someone asked what was the key thing in the Second World War that meant we didn't lose, you'd say: the RAF. And yet we are losing those buildings hand over fist.
This particular building was the control tower for an airfield where, day after day in 1941 and 1942, young men who were often 17, 18, 19 - two weeks' training, and you're in a Spitfire on your own up in the sky, trying to hold back the advance of fascism - took off and sometimes didn't come back. This building is a crucible of that. And it was also the site where David Niven and Leslie Howard made a film in 1941 about the Spitfire as the engineering and spiritual salvation for the war effort. So you get the military sacrifice and the story of morale and national spirit all in one place. We hope to start on site this year - it's going to be a very stylish 1940s Landmark, with great big rooms and wonderful fields of vision.
And the third is Mavisbank, just outside Edinburgh, which has been a conservation cause célèbre for 50 years. It's a spectacularly important early 18th century building, built in the 1720s by William Adam - the founder of the great architectural dynasty, whose son Robert Adam is so celebrated. It was really the first perfect example of a neoclassical building in Scotland. But it was bought by a negligent owner who presided over it being gutted by fire, and it has been a shell at risk of collapse ever since.
We've been working on this for a decade, we've raised over six million pounds towards its rescue, and we are now in the process of a compulsory purchase to finally take control of the building. Hopefully within a year or so we'll be able to start work on repairing it.
What concerns you most about the future of historic buildings in Britain?
The real problem is when buildings cease to be functionally viable for the reason they were built. The crisis around country houses in the 60s and 70s has largely been navigated - the combination of inventive owners and genuine public appetite for visiting them has stabilised things. But there are areas where that hasn't happened.
The first is churches. By far the biggest category of listed and Grade I listed buildings in this country are churches. We've got an astonishing proliferation of Grade I listed medieval churches. But congregations have dwindled - often just a handful of people in the front seats - and that's only going to go in one direction. And they're not any single person's responsibility: each parish church belongs to its parish and its churchwardens, who are some nice local people with no resources to do anything about it. So we have a serious problem, and we need as a nation to understand it and think collectively about solutions.
And then there are civic buildings - the ones in our town centres that no longer have a use. The wonderful 1930s post office right in the middle of a town, closed 15 years ago, just standing there with things growing out of it. The Edwardian library, abandoned. Great ornate law courts, police stations - services now provided digitally or simply no longer needed in the same way. These are very specific buildings built to do a very particular job, and repurposing them is hard. But if we don't do something about it, our towns become doughnuts with a hole in the middle. These places are already hardwired into the physical structure of our towns and settlements - we have to be imaginative and actively promoting their reuse, before it's simply a case of building everything new and leaving the old to rot.
Finally - why do historic buildings really matter?
I think there's a head and a heart answer. On the head point: these buildings are the physical manifestation of our history. They tell us so much about where we've come from, why things are the way they are, what the priorities and aspirations of our forebears were. Through them we can access a whole universe of the past, which is all we've got to go on, frankly, for the future. So you might as well make the most of it.
But then there's a whole other thing, which is about an emotional connection to place. In our modern, quite secularist age, we can undervalue this, and I think we shouldn't. Stonehenge was built to honour ancestors, on a site that had already been sacred for thousands of years before the stones went up. Our feeling about places that have ancient qualities is very profound, and it is a constant through all of human history - you can see it in the veneration of classical antiquity that has informed the design of half the country houses of England.
And I feel like the work we do at the Landmark Trust is profoundly quite romantic. Not in a hearts-and-flowers way, but in the sense that there is something that makes your heart flutter about seeing a really beautiful old Tudor brick chimney, or watching the light fall through leaded windows and handmade glass onto timber floorboards. There is a kind of beauty and poetry in all of that, that is part of what it is to be alive and to be human. And we'd weep so much if we lost it.
The Landmark Trust's buildings can be explored and booked at landmarktrust.org.uk. Anna Keay's book The Restless Republic is published by William Collins.
