Profile Dame Fiona Reynolds

A WEEK IN THE LIFE
DAME FIONA REYNOLDS
sunday times June 22

When Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director General of the National Trust, appeared on Desert Island Discs her luxury was a set of Ordnance Survey maps of Britain and her book The Making Of The English Landscape.

Dame Fiona, 50, says she has always had a passionate love of the countryside. “It is in my blood.”

So in 2001, when she learned the Trust’s top job was being advertised, she turned her back on two and a half years heading up the Cabinet Office Women’s Unit.

“It was fascinating and I had learned a lot, but this was my dream job. I never expected to get it,” she says, “and I just love it in so many ways.”

Dame Fiona, the Trust’s first female head since its foundation in 1895 by the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill, earns more than £130,000. She studied geography and land management at Cambridge and has worked on green issues throughout her career apart from the interlude in Whitehall.

She now runs one of the world’s largest non-governmental organisations. With 3.5 million members, the charity looks after more than 620,000 acres of land of outstanding natural beauty across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 705 miles of coastline and hundreds of historic sites including houses, castles, villages and lighthouses.

A permanent staff of around 500 is helped by some 50,000 volunteers.

“There’s no such thing as an average week. I love the variety and am out as much as I can be. One or two days a week are spent at properties. Last week I was in the South East. Tomorrow I am in Wessex and next week in Devon and Cornwall.

She is based at the new Trust HQ in Swindon and attends board meetings and looks after management tasks there, but visits London most weeks.

“My role as leader is to set a strategic direction and champion it. It is definitely not about telling individual properties or people what do.”

Her travels enable her to gather ideas from the experiences of staff and volunteers that can feed into the Trust’s new strategy.

“It is a move from encouraging people to join the Trust, to encouraging them to join in. It’s a simple proposition – for people to not just visit but to get involved.”

She cites a successful venture at Cothele in Cornwall where families now help to create the annual Christmas garlands that decorate the house.

But though the Trust remains the custodian of places of beauty and historical importance – “we need them for our spiritual and emotional and physical refreshment” - it is also confronting the challenge of climate change.

“I often call us the nation’s canary. Because of the scale of our property ownership we can see the bigger picture and spot trends that individuals might not always see. We’ve done a lot of work on the impact of climate change on gardens and on its likely impacts on coastline – more than government departments have done.”