To those of us who grew up steeped in the National Trust's creation myths, they were always simply ‘the Founders’, a triumvirate of visionaries who stood shoulder to shoulder at the end of the nineteenth century to stem the tide of ugliness that was sweeping through the country, succeeding where the likes of William Morris failed, because they understood that possession is nine-tenths of preservation. And they each possessed distinctive attributes which set them apart from the others. Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley was the messianic clergyman with the big beard, a single-issue salvationist driven by horror at the way in which the railways were cutting through his beloved Lake District. Robert Hunter was the one who dealt with the boring legal stuff, a worthy but dull civil servant.

And Octavia Hill – well, Octavia Hill was first among equals. She was a socialist. At least, she was a Christian Socialist: that was good enough for us. She cared about the proletariat, campaigning for ‘open air sitting rooms for the poor’, oases of calm where the working classes could find a refuge from the drudgery imposed on them by the bosses. She was a woman, battling male hegemonies. We secretly hoped she might be gay, too, but the National Trust's hagiographies remained resolutely tight-lipped on that one. Still, she represented the progressive liberal origins of the National Trust, a comfort at a time when the organization was being run by men in tweeds with reactionary views and their own places in the country. It came as something of a surprise to find out later that she had a career outside the National Trust as a housing reformer. But that just added to her liberal credentials.

And then, as Elizabeth Baigent notes in her survey of Hill's fluctuating reputation which opens this thought-provoking collection, this paragon of progressive thought fell spectacularly from grace. ‘Her opposition to women's suffrage and the welfare state, and her support for the C[harity] O[rganization] S[ociety], which came to epitomize middle-class busybodies from charities interfering in the lives of the poor people they professed to help, made her unattractive and alien to modern sensibilities. Moreover, her Christianity, when combined with her apparently wholehearted embrace of laissez-faire, made her, her projects and her writings seem hypocritical, pietistic and moralistic.’ The radical metamorphosed into a reactionary and, having claimed Hill as their own for half a century, urban historians and preservationists scrambled to denounce her.

The 2012 centenary of Hill's death provided the occasion for a defiant National Trust to unveil a memorial to her in the nave of Westminster Abbey. It also signalled that it was time for a more nuanced revaluation of her life and work, and two of the happier results were a conference held at the National Trust's Sutton House in Hackney with the title of ‘“Nobler imaginings and mightier struggles”: Octavia Hill, social activism and the remaking of British society’, and this collection of 14 well-illustrated essays, the product of that conference.

Contributors range far and wide, from Elizabeth Heath's ‘The reluctant sitter’, a fascinating account of the attempts by Hill's friends and relations to have her sit for her portrait, to William Whyte's tour of nineteenth-century social housing in Southwark, complete with maps and postcodes so that the reader can conduct their own architectural tour of the remnants of philanthropic enterprise. Winchester Cottages, a group of 14 four-roomed cottages put up in the 1890s at Hill's urging, are no longer social housing, notes Whyte ruefully: they now change hands for up to £900,000 each.

There is a good balance between biographical context, accounts of Hill's social activism and assessments of her involvement in the early preservation movement. In an excellent discussion of Hill's evolving relationship with landscape, Paul Readman tellingly points up the way in which her love of the land was bound up with her ideas of patriotism and Englishness, quoting her declaration that ‘As our great men, as our ancient buildings, as our national institutions, as our Royal family, as our British flag, being possessions of all, unite us, so do our forests, our commons and our foot-paths.’ Ben Cowell, whose essay on politics and the early National Trust concludes the book, rightly emphasizes Hill's focus on charitable endeavour as her great contribution to British society.

The contributors lead the reader gently through the world of pathologically earnest Victorian societies and associations inhabited by Hill and her friends, from the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, the Ladies’ Sanitary Association and Canon Rawnsley's Lake District Defence Society to my own favourite, the Association for the Prevention of Pauperization and Crime, of which Hill was a founder member. They occasionally teeter on the edge of strange: ‘From an early age,’ says Readman, for example, ‘Hill had great affection for footpaths.’ But every paper in this collection adds something to our understanding of a campaigner who made, and was made by, her times. She certainly was not perfect. But who is?