Councils and Preservation
A real advance in the methods of preserving rural England has been made by the proposed new alliance between local councils and the National Trust. A great deal of land and a good many buildings would be made over to the National Trust, if it had the money necessary for buying and for looking after the property. The County Councils Association has accepted the principle of a Bill that gives local councils the option of contributing both to the acquisition and main- tenance of land desired by the National Trust. It is an urgent practical necessity that the Trust be supplied in some way with sufficient funds to enable it to save pieces of land precious to the public for aesthetic or historic reasons. The simplest method would, of course, be a national grant that should make the Trust national in fact as well as in name. If local councils prove sufficiently sympathetic, the new Bill will go a long way towards the nationalisation of the Trust. The trouble is that many local authorities are greater friends of the developers, so called, than of the preservers, though the cult of preservation has immensely increased thanks largely to the wise activities of the C.P.R.E. We should all be members of it, and it needs more members.
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