Chiswick House and Gardens Trust is a dynamic, fast-paced and ambitious charity, responsible for managing the Grade I-listed Chiswick House and Grade I-registered 65-acre, award-winning Gardens. The Gardens include 21 listed garden buildings and statues, as well as a community Kitchen Garden. Chiswick is part of the National Heritage Collection of state-owned sites and is the birthplace of the English Landscape movement, a site of international significance in architectural and garden history.

Today, the gardens are free to visit – the only free-to-visit Grade I-listed formal gardens in London open 365 days per year – and welcomes a million visitors annually, many of whom have become members or patrons. Chiswick House and Gardens is a place of inspiration, rejuvenation and learning, at the heart of its community. It draws on 300 years of pioneering design, horticultural excellence and social history to reach a broad group of visitors, increasingly representative of the diverse residents of Hounslow and West London, alongside visitors from further afield. It continually looks for new ways to make the House and Gardens more accessible, striving to be a place ‘for everyone, every day’.

The Trust believe that heritage sites have more than one role to play, and that it can offer both a historic experience while also recognising the enormous potential of Chiswick House & Gardens to respond to some of the challenges society faces. In 2020, it launched its new Ten Year Strategy setting out a new mission and vision for its future and a four-phase capital development plan to enable the expansion of its community, learning and creative impact.

Since then, the Trust made significant progress: establishing a successful and oversubscribed community programme, launching a new membership scheme, relaunching its Patrons programme and creating a new Case for Support that reflects its ambitions to better serve its local community. You can see a photographic summary of recent highlights here.

As part of natural succession on the Board, Chiswick House and Gardens is looking for a new Chair. The responsibilities of the Chair of the Trust include:

• Providing strategic and inclusive leadership to the Board
• Acting as an ambassador for the Trust
• Ensuring a well-balanced and representative Board of Trustees and ongoing compliance with relevant legislation, regulation and the Charities Governance Code
• Establishing and maintaining a strong and constructive working relationship with the Director, supporting and holding them to account to achieve the new mission, vision and objectives of the Trust and day to day running of the estate
• Providing oversight and mentoring to the Director, agreeing their objectives, overseeing their performance through regular meetings and a formal performance review, and reporting this to the Board
• Setting the agenda for Board meetings, in consultation with the Director in order to enable the Board to monitor the progress of the Trust against the strategic plan and annual budgets
• Ensuring collaborative and sound decision-making
• Understanding the requirements for good governance and holding excellent relationship building skills within a complex, multi-faceted stakeholder environment

The new Chair will need to be equally passionate about both heritage, and community engagement, and will therefore be focused on the social impact which heritage can deliver. They will be strongly aligned to the Trust's mission of making Chiswick House and Gardens "For everyone - every day" and engage with community initiatives including the Kitchen Gardens and local school outreach. They will therefore be able to demonstrate their experience of working with community engagement and social impact projects previously.

The successful candidate will have held senior leadership positions previously within not-for-profit organisations, either in an executive or non-executive capacity. The Trust is open-minded about private or public sector experience candidates may have also gained, so long as they have previous non-executive experience in any sector. They will bring a strategic mindset, and will be well-networked within their field. As the Trust embarks on a four-phase capital development programme, for which fundraising has just begun, it is important for the new Chair to have previous experience of capital fundraising. Due to the focus on fundraising for this role, financial acumen and experience would also be viewed as beneficial.

As Chair, the successful candidate will have excellent communication skills in order to externally advocate for the Trust and share its successes, and internally develop strong working relationships with the staff and Board.

A full list of the Board of Trustees can be found here.

This role is unremunerated, but reasonable, pre-agreed expenses such as travel and childcare will be reimbursed. The time commitment for this role includes:

• Regular meetings with the Director, offering oversight, advice, mentoring and support
• Chairing five Board meetings per year
• Attending partnership meetings with English Heritage and London Borough of Hounslow twice per year
• Attending events held by Chiswick House and Gardens particularly in support of major donors, Patrons and fundraising for the capital campaign
• Managing the Trustee body, including recruitment as necessary, chairing any nominations working group for new Trustees
• Supporting the Director with cultivating key stakeholder and funder relationships
• Attending the Finance Audit and Risk committee three times per year, and other committees (Development and Heritage, also both three times per year) as requested

All meetings take place on the grounds of Chiswick House and Gardens in West London. 

The position is subject to approval from English Heritage and London Borough of Hounslow. The appointment is for a four-year term, which can be renewed once at the discretion of the Board.

Chiswick House and Gardens Trust are dedicated to considering a broad array of candidates, including those with diverse work experiences and backgrounds.