Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, creator of the resort village of Portmeirion, Wales, wrote On Trust for the Nation (Paul Elek, London 1947) for the National Trust in Great Britain. Here are some excepts:
The world that I was born into more than sixty years ago was then truly, I do believe, as fair as it then seemed to my entranced young eyes; but the world that I shall leave upon my death will be but a sadly battered remnant of all that loveliness that I had lightly thought was a secure inheritance.
We must not bear to dwell much on that monstrous tale of ruin, even now when the full count has yet to be made, but we need to take solemn cognizance of the account that will be rendered. This should be done in no spirit of hugging the thorn, but because action must spring from our grief. Every bit of beauty destroyed enhances the value of what is left to us and makes it still more imperative that the remaining loveliness should be preserved...
If now, when the guns and the bombs are silent, we allow greed, the housing-crisis, the need for new roads for new water-power or new factories, still further to waste what war has left us, we shall have done something worse than destroy the actual living beauty of that waterfall or of that little town...
For we can, if we are clever...have both beautiful new developments along with the old, and the natural beauty as well. If we are stupid we shall have destroyed a beauty whose example would have set a standard...
I think that Beauty, The Strange Necessity - as Rebecca West once called it - is something that matters profoundly to humanity, and that unless the race of man perishes from the earth, it will increasingly value that Grace, will seek it, and will ultimately attain it.
It is against that happier day, perhaps remote, that the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty must guard all it can of our remaining treasures, hold for us bastions of unsullied graciousness from which, some day, our descendants may learn how splendid was an earlier, "poorer" England...
