The heart of the matter

I don’t expect you to care very much about this story. After all, it’s nothing exceptional. All across the country, much the same thing is happening, to varying degrees, going mostly unreported. It’s an unspoken epidemic, and I could just as easily be writing about any of those other stories. But this one particularly matters to me. It’s on my doorstep. It’s about a place I love. And it’s a story of incompetence, injustice and a community that has had enough.

It is the story of Dartington Hall in south Devon. Local people still have access to the 1,200-acre estate’s footpaths, beautiful gardens, cinema, cafes and bar. It is home to about 170 pioneering social enterprises, and to many people doing amazing work. It hosts 42 heritage buildings, some pioneering early 20th century architecture, and a Henry Moore sculpture.

Like a football match, our story is one of two halves. In 1923, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst bought the estate to develop as an experiment bringing together the arts, education, agriculture, architecture, craftsmanship, dance and more to see if together they might create a different model for rural regeneration. For the first 50 years, it was a roaring success. Rabindranath Tagore spent time there, as did Michael Chekhov. The NHS and the welfare state were designed there. In its time, it was a hotbed for radical ideas.

Then the Elmhirsts died, she in 1968 and he in 1974, leaving the estate in trust, and the second half of our story began. Left with buildings and very little cash, the decline set in. A series of boards and CEOs lived off a long-distant legacy as the family silver, both literally and metaphorically, was sold off. Huge salaries were paid to the managers who oversaw this decline, and whenever the finances dipped low, the trust would sell off another field around the neighbouring village to developers, usually in the face of staunch local opposition.

Local people have compared the situation to the legend of the minotaur: once a year, local people had to offer up another teenager (in this case, a field) to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the minotaur (here, an organisation incapable of living within their means). Local planners, under the cosh from central government to meet housing targets, were only too happy to oblige with the necessary planning consents.

It came to a head in 2014, when the trust offered 17 fields up for mass housing developments without any consideration for the impact on the community or environment. Local people, campaigning under the slogan “Don’t Bury Dartington Under Concrete”, held a vote of no confidence in the board of Dartington Hall Trust (which resoundingly lost) and in response the trust promised a new future relationship with the community, one where the majority of development would only take place on the “core estate”, ending the practice of selling fields around the village.

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Instead, in September 2018, to raise much-needed cash the trust came up with the idea of a bond issue, aiming to raise £20m of investment into the estate. They spent £1.15m on consultants and legal advice, but when the shares launched it tanked, raising just £50,000. Hardly a resounding return on investment.

Even though many other people were clearly involved and it had been approved by the entire board, the CEO took the bullet and was sacked. Instead, it was announced that so dire were the trust’s finances – they had lost £5m in the past year alone – that they would now have to sell off two large pieces of land around a village already home to plenty of new houses, making way for potentially several hundred more, despite promising that they would not be sold until 2028. In their 2015 accounts, the trust wrote: “We will need to devise a model which does not require asset sales to support the heritage costs of our estate or our activities.”

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We now know, however, that while this promise was being made, the board was actively moving forward with the sale behind closed doors. Things were so financially dire that the trust had “no choice”, it said. And all of this is taking place in the context of a government poised to rip up most planning controls in a free-for-all for developers in which communities have very little say. “Take back control” indeed.

So far, so familiar. Like communities across the land, we are now threatened with hundreds of homes being built, adding to already unsustainable congestion along the traffic corridor linking Torbay to Plymouth – which has consistently breached legal (and safe) air pollution limits for over a decade. With NHS boss Simon Stevens declaring air pollution a “health emergency” in the UK, local people are all too aware of the impacts this development will have, particularly on their children’s health (with seven schools along the stretches of road most affected). It is hard to fathom how the trust’s board can reconcile the contradictions between its own sustainability objectives and the social and environmental impacts of selling its land to developers.

But this is Totnes. This is Dartington. People do things differently here. It’s a town that has pioneered community-led approaches to development. It’s an active and engaged community that understands sustainability and social justice and is home to many exemplary projects modelling just that. Much as people love the Dartington Hall estate, they have had enough of Dartington Hall Trust. They no longer believe them. When the trust tells people that “we just need to sell these two more fields and then we will be able to be financially solvent into the future”, to them it sounds like an alcoholic saying “just this one last bottle of whisky and then I’ll give up”. It appears the trust hasn’t learnt its lesson.

And so local people have formed a new organisation, Saving Dartington, which is taking a coordinated and focused approach to halting the sales. Their mission is to hold the trustees to account for their actions, arguing that if things carry on as they are, without substantial and fundamental changes, there will be no third part to the Dartington story. That story needs to be rooted in commons, in community, in modelling the most proactive and imaginative responses to the climate emergency. The future depends on engaging and working with local people, not against their interests.

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The Saving Dartington group is submitting a formal complaint to the Charity Commission about how the trust is operating. They are looking into a potential legal challenge based on the impact additional housing will have on air quality on the road that passes local schools through the village. They are also seeking protection for the greater horseshoe bats that depend on the land for survival. They have applied, along with Don’t Bury Dartington, to have one of those fields, Broom Park, designated as an “asset of community value”, based upon a vision of it as a community resource for biodiversity and community engagement.

In short, they are doing everything they can to block a development that, on sustainability grounds alone, should never have been on the cards in the first place. They are concerned that the trust’s promise of “only 80 eco-houses” built on Broom Park are bogus because any contract for the field’s sale will include an “uplift”, earning more revenue for every additional house the developer can squeeze on. In short, they have very little trust left.

While across the country the story of developers preying on communities to build substandard, overpriced housing is nothing new, here, in Dartington, in theory at least, things should be different. ​Dartington Hall Trust is, after all, an organisation which “aspires to bring together people and ideas to become a testbed and model for a sustainable society”. They have pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025… but to fund this by building hundreds of concrete houses is like funding it by opening a coal mine.

Saving Dartington’s imaginative approach to campaigning is one that has the best interests of the estate at its heart. They are opposing the way the trust is behaving not because they hate the place, but because they love it. But unless they can bring about fundamental change in the governance and culture of the organisation, it will soon be asset-stripped and picked apart by developers.

“What if”, Saving Dartington asks, “this organisation actually lived its values and acted as though this actually were a climate emergency?”