‘The challenge is to provide for everyone’: the National Trust under fire

The conservation organisation is increasingly focused on reaching a wider range of people. But recent controversies highlight deep divisions over its purposeThe Vyne in Hampshire, in the care of the National Trust since 1956, has something of a split personality, comprising as it does the remains of a Tudor mansion, built for Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain, Lord Sandys, and an 18th century country pile, once the home of the vividly named Chaloner Chute, speaker of the House of Commons in th