‘Buildings can have wonderful new uses': Celebrating 60 years of The Landmark Trust

Telegraph

16-04-2025

The visitors' book at 13, Princelet Street, East London, is a thing of wonder. For a start it is bound in smart green cloth and weighs about five pounds. As for the actual visitors, we turned the pages with mounting envy and alarm: who were these people?
There was a stunning full-page watercolour of the house; a flat-fronted, dark-brick, four-storey dwelling in a grid of Spitalfields streets largely completed by 1720. There was a hand-made pop-up house in stiff paper. There were vignettes and poems and childish scribbles and faintly competitive visit tallies ('Our second!/fifth!/tenth!').
The Landmark Trust celebrates 60 years as a heritage charity next month and over the years its portfolio of distinctive holiday lets has delighted an equally distinctive type of customer. Landmarkers, as they are known, are engaged, appreciative, lovers of history and architecture, and largely indifferent to the absence of TV and Wi-Fi in properties. Some have been coming since the charity was founded in 1965 by banker Sir John Smith and his wife, Christian, who was involved until her death in 2018.
Their idea was simple: to rescue fading properties too insignificant to be scooped up by the National Trust or English Heritage, from Britain's most elegant pigsty in North Yorkshire to a stone pineapple in Falkirk. Then turn them into holiday lets, comfortably but not opulently furnished, and stock them with relevant books and maps. Then use the income to rescue and restore more buildings at risk, and so on.
The fact that over half a century later those aims and values have changed relatively little make the Landmark Trust, rather like Stonehenge, a mirror to the zeitgeist.
'The world is almost unrecognisable from 10 years ago,' said the charity's director, Dr Anna Keay, who joined in the run-up to the last big anniversary. 'When we turned 50, we'd just started online bookings (today, 85 per cent of bookings are online), newspapers were still the primary source of information and we were all using high-street shops.'
I've been to loads of Landmarks. We used to book one each year for a break with my mother, usually in Dorset, and friends have booked them for celebrations. But this was my first in London, where there are four.
It was weirdly peaceful. Sirens sounded like distant tropical birds. No noise floated over from Brick Lane, packed with people before Eid.
The next-door neighbour, resident for 30 years, told us about his art exhibition. We went to a tiny cinema, a huge museum, an art gallery, a flower market, a pub, grocery shops, churches and a great Vietnamese restaurant, all on foot.
We read books about the East End and a forensic property history, written by an architectural historian, telling the story of the house from its late 18th-century zenith, when it was probably owned by Huguenot silk merchants, to its nadir in the 1970s, when development threatened.
Its saviour, Peter Lerwill, spent money and love on bringing it back to life and, on his death, he left it to the Landmark Trust.
Its survival seems incredible, but as Dr Keay pointed out, upheaval is nothing new. In turbulent periods, one example being the Industrial Revolution, buildings used for a specific purpose became suddenly redundant, and the landscape changed forever.
'What the Landmark Trust has demonstrated over 60 years,' she added. 'Is that buildings can have new uses, and these can be wonderful and uplifting, and all that care and trouble taken on them can find a new life. We just stick at doing what we do and that has a simplicity to it that holds up well.'
Not that the last decade has been a doddle. Airbnb, for example, has added 30 per cent more inventory into the broad arena in which the Trust operates. English Heritage started its 'Heritage Lets' programme in 2006, the National Trust has let holiday cottages since the 1940s and many private historic properties, from estate cottages to former lighthouse keepers' cottages, are available for rental. It's highly competitive.
During Covid, properties were offered as accommodation to emergency NHS staff, and when lockdowns ended the Trust was in one way sitting pretty, with most of its properties rural, stand-alone and on the British mainland (there are a few abroad).
At one point, occupancy was almost 100 per cent. On the other hand, they had the same staffing issues as anyone else, at a time when cleaning, for instance, was critical. And when 'abroad' opened up again, occupancy slid back to a more normal 80-85 per cent.
On the plus side they are adding to their 111,000+ followers on Instagram and other social media platforms, which has increased awareness not just with over-55s but with elusive 18-to-24-year-olds. A 15 per cent booking discount within 28 days of rental is particularly aimed at the latter; a new, more flexible, pre-children demographic.
An apprenticeship scheme at the furniture-making workshops in Honeybourne has run successfully for 10 years and a focus on the environment has seen 30 Landmarks fitted with sustainable heating systems. All new properties will be supplied with ground source heat pumps or equivalent, helped by the solid walls, hefty curtains and chunky doors of a pre-central heating world. The kicker? EV (electric vehicle) charging points are becoming a necessity and that means… whisper it softly ... Wi-Fi.
Will they keep it separate somehow? Put it in a lead cupboard? Down a locked well? One thing is certain: Landmarkers will have an opinion and will state it trenchantly.
As part of their 60th celebrations, the Trust have added, just for 2025, an extra 10 free stays to the 'Fifty for Free' offer they started ten years ago, when charities can apply for free stays in properties during the November low season. It has been taken up by elderly carers, victims of domestic violence and young widows, among others.
As for the future, they are choosy about which properties to take on, perhaps two a year, and next up are a 1720s politician's mansion south of Edinburgh and a flat in the former Mayor's Parlour, part of a huge Lottery-funded restoration of Dover Town Hall. Their attention is now turning to high streets and former industrial buildings.
Meanwhile, back in Princelet Street, facing that spectacular book, we got visitors' block. I dumped my painting of a garden urn. Someone dutifully wrote the sort of thing you write in normal visitors' books.
Then, with a wistful backward glance at our panelled interiors and our elegant garden surrounded by our neighbours' houses crested with clapboard-and-pantile weavers' garrets, we stepped back into reality.
Ten quirky Landmarks for rent
All with 2025 availability at the time of writing
1. Music Room, Lancashire
A glorious Baroque fantasy of a garden pavilion, built around 1730 for a prosperous lawyer in the centre of Lancaster. Its royal icing walls are covered in plaster images of Apollo and the Muses (including Amorous Poetry), there's a baby grand piano to play, and it's right in the middle of all the fun. Sleeps two, four nights from £332.
2. The Semaphore Tower, Surrey
Relatively newly opened, Britain's only remaining semaphore tower, built after the Napoleonic Wars to house the pre-telegraph signalling system used to send messages between the Admiralty in London and Portsmouth. The system is demonstrated on open days. The tower is surrounded by 800 acres of heathland, great for walking, cycling and birdwatching from the roof. Sleep four, four nights from £524.
3. Sant' Antonio, near Rome
A former Franciscan monastery built around 850 AD that includes part of a Roman villa, possibly home to the poet Horace. It has a monastic simplicity, with thick walls and little decoration inside or out, and sits in terraced gardens overlooking Tivoli's waterfall and up at the tiny church above. Sleeps 12, four nights from £1176.
4. Methwold Old Vicarage, Norfolk
Showy architecture seems slightly shocking in a vicarage, but who cares when you've got a dazzling late fifteenth-century gable end, timber framing and decorated upper rooms, all opposite a Grade-I listed church. Perfect for the dry chalk plateau of The Brecks, Ely Cathedral and Grimes Graves. Sleeps five, four nights from £536.
5. Lock Cottage, Worcestershire
There's nothing like a no-nonsense building and this lock-keeper's cottage sits by the 30-mile-long Worcester & Birmingham Canal, which was completed in 1815 to 'lift' boats up to Birmingham via 58 locks. There is lots to do, including strolling along to the magnificent 30-lock Tardebigge Flight. Sleeps four, four nights from £344.
6. The Library, Devon
Well of course you need a library and orangery (summer only) in your back garden, and these fine, redbrick, eighteenth-century pavilions with gabled roofs, pilasters and long windows make a perfect billet for four, two in each, separated by 100 yards of garden. The ruins of a later Victorian house and arboretum are nearby.
7. Iron Bridge House, Shropshire
The top two floors of this sturdy house, built for a local grocer over his shop, look straight across the River Severn to the world's first complete iron bridge, symbol of the Industrial Revolution. Ironbridge Gorge is stuffed with museums and sights - so buy a pass and see them at your leisure. Sleeps four, four nights from £432.
8. Glenmallock Lodge, Dumfries & Galloway
The Countess of Galloway built this cottage as a schoolroom in the early nineteenth century, and girls were taught the three Rs and how to ply their needles here for over 40 years. Now it sits at the end of a track in the middle of the glen, a mile from the Solway Firth and near the Wigton Peninsula. Sleeps two, four nights from £296.
9. West Blockhouse, Pembrokeshire
Here's a view. This mid-Victorian fort housed around 40 men until after the Second World War, with a battery of heavy guns guarding the entrance to Milford Haven harbour. The walls are limestone, rooms are lined with pine and it sits high above the Atlantic with a spiral staircase up to a roof terrace. Sleeps eight, four nights from £628.
10. Culloden Tower, Yorkshire
The local MP built himself this pepperpot tower in 1746 as a crow of triumph after the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden. It has two octagonal rooms, a light-filled sitting room and is brilliantly placed on the edge of the Dales, within easy reach of Richmond and its Georgian theatre. Sleeps four, four nights from £728.
13 Princelet Street (London E1) sleeps six in three rooms from £1,412 for four nights; landmarktrust.org.uk