THE head of the National Trust has announced a shift in its policy away from preserving stately homes and towards protecting the countryside from wholesale housing development.

Sir William Proby, chairman of the trust which has 3.5m members, warned its annual general meeting in London yesterday of the rapid “gobbling up” of green fields.

The move signals a return towards the founding principles of the trust, set up in 1895 to protect against the destructive effects of industrialisation.

Proby, who has been in post since May 2003, admitted that as owner of Elton Hall near Peterborough he had personally been more concerned with the built heritage and country houses.

“But you only have to look around and see the pace at which our precious countryside is being gobbled up to see that this now has to be a top priority,” he said.

“As our population grows relentlessly, our green spaces become a more finite and precious resource. Armed with the National Trust Act and a great tradition . . . we must give serious consideration to what we can do to help this situation.”

The change in priorities means that the trust, which has an annual income of about £350m from members, legacies, donations, visits and commercial activities, will be spending more on buying land, much of it in the green belt and other areas around towns and cities.

It recently bought Divis and Black Mountain, an area around Belfast, from the Ministry of Defence.

Other purchases include Wembury Point, near Plymouth, and Wicken Fen nature reserve between Cambridge and Ely.

It may also link up with conservation bodies such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, English Heritage and Natural England, the government’s countryside quango, to buy areas of the countryside in need of protection.

The trust will now ask its members to contribute to individual fighting funds set up to preserve specific areas of Britain where it believes there is a realistic chance of buying the land.

The high cost of maintaining the trust’s collection of about 300 buildings will restrict the spare funds that it has from existing resources.

Its houses include Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s home in East Sussex; Castle Drogo in Devon; the cottage of playwright George Bernard Shaw in Hertfordshire; and Tyntesfield near Bristol, a stately home which it bought in 2002 for £25m. The restoration bill for the Victorian gothic mansion has already run into millions of pounds.

The total bill for the backlog of repairs now facing the trust is about £200m.

The new emphasis on buying up land is reminiscent of Enterprise Neptune in the 1960s when the trust bought for £40m about 600 miles of coastland. That has risen to 700 miles. The trust now owns 617,500 acres, making it Britain’s biggest private landowner.

Its rural holdings include large parts of the Lake District and Dartmoor and amount to 1.5% of the land of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland has its own National Trust.

The trust is also fighting campaigns to protect areas it owns such as Hatfield Forest, which is threatened by the proposed expansion of Stansted airport, and Osterley Park in west London, which would be endangered by a possible third runway at Heathrow.

While Proby and the trust accept that homes have to be built in Britain, they believe that more should be erected on brownfield sites. The government has indicated that 60% of new homes will be on brownfield sites, but the trust thinks that figure should be 80%.

The government is planning 3m new homes by 2020.

Proby said there had been little evidence that Whitehall had been listening to public concern about the right balance between housing and the countryside. “Too many genuinely public-spirited citizens are being unjustly tarred with the ‘nimby’ brush,” he said.

This weekend Country Life magazine gave support to Proby. “In 10 years, England will no longer be a green and pleasant land if the green belt and greenfield sites are desecrated,” said Mark Hedges, the magazine’s editor.

Historic mission

- The National Trust has 3.5m members and 43,000 volunteers. Each year, more than 12m visitors tour its historic houses

- Early areas of countryside acquired by the trust included 1,400 acres around Stonehenge in 1927 and 4,000 acres around Coniston Water in the Lake District, some given by Beatrix Potter, the author

- Big appeals have included Enterprise Neptune, launched in the 1960s to buy unspoilt coastline. The trust now owns 20% of the English, Welsh and Northern Irish coast

- The trust banned hunting with dogs on its land in 1997

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