Leave the car at home, says National Trust

Charity’s 10-year vision wants to move away from days out and ‘outdated mansion experiences’

The National Trust is planning to discourage visitors from making lengthy journeys to stately homes, according to a briefing document seen by The Daily Telegraph. Under the proposals, the trust is seeking to “reduce journey times and increase non-car access” to its homes and gardens, to “better manage the carbon impact of visiting”. The document says there will come a need for a “shift from a reliance on days out to more flexible community use”.

THE National Trust is planning to wage war on cars by discouraging visitors from making lengthy journeys to their country properties, according to a briefing document seen by The Daily Telegraph.

Under the proposals, the trust is seeking to “reduce journey times and increase non-car access” to its vast portfolio of stately homes and gardens. In doing so, it hopes to “better manage the carbon impact of visiting”.

The document says there will come a need for a “shift from a reliance on days out to more flexible community use”.

The plans are contained in a 14-page briefing document entitled “Towards a 10-year vision for places and experiences” which will raise eyebrows among some of the Trust’s most loyal members, for whom a day out by car to a country property is a great joy.

Written by Tony Berry, the charity’s visitor experience director, the document was drawn up in response to lockdown, which it says has accelerated “some tricky choices” for the National Trust over “which activities to stop, start and continue”.

The trust, which has six million members, is proposing 1,200 redundancies to make up the financial shortfall caused by the pandemic. It has 15,000 staff and 70,000 volunteers across its huge estate of historic houses and castles. It is not clear how the trust could achieve more localised visits when so many of its properties are in rural areas hard to reach without a car.

It complains that “its current visitor model puts a disproportionate load on peak times” and that the “outdated mansion experience” largely serves “a loyal but (by 2030) dwindling audience”.

Mr Berry instead promotes a new vision for the next decade, of “building long-term, deep and sustainable relationships with people who live close by. That will allow us to better manage the carbon impact of visiting, by reducing journey times and increasing noncar access”.

Critics of the National Trust’s current management will also raise concerns that the charity plans to raise more money by increasingly hiring out stately homes for “specialised experiences”.

Dr Amy Boyington, an architectural historian said: “This again feeds in to the whole ‘dumbing down’ of history within the NT, where it believes that to be accessible to everyone it needs to make history flashy, punchy and Disney-esque.”

In a statement, the National Trust said: “The trust document on a vision for places and experiences was an internal discussion document to look at possible ways forward as we emerge from the coronavirus crisis. It is not a strategy.

“We remain committed to, and passionate about, the country house and arts and heritage. And we will not dumb down. We will always welcome the en- thusiasts and the specialists, and provide them with experiences that are tailored for their interests, such as at places like Kingston Lacy and Petworth.”

It added: “We accept that the presentation of some of our houses can be improved and we need to make sure they are meaningful and relevant for the 21st century. We want to move away from a one-size-fits-all model and to focus on the diversity of our places and ensure we make the most of our collections.”

The National Trust: could an organisation want a better name? To be national and to be trusted is the ambition of every major British charity, institution, business and political party*. Since its foundation in 1895, the National Trust has, on the whole, lived up to its name. It is the most successful heritage organisation in the world. That is why it has more than 600,000 acres and nearly six million members.

It is interesting to recall the trust’s full name. It is The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. This title links buildings with gardens, landscapes and coastline. Whenever people within the trust have tried to break that link, there has been trouble. Whenever they have strengthened it, there has been success.

Historically, there has always been a tension between what a great former supporter, Sir John Smith, called “the Lilies and the Boots”. The Lilies were the aesthete curators who cared about the collections and fabric of the more than 200 historic houses. The Boots were the land agents who wanted to make the estates work and preferred the great outdoors.

This tension was usually more creative than destructive. The relationship between what is built by man and what is grown by harnessing nature is a glory of the British landscape. The National Trust has maintained this relationship, and sometimes improved it. That is what ensures its appeal to people of all classes and widely differing tastes. Members understand that it is all one thing – what Beatrix Potter, inventor of Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten, called “a noble thing”. Because she believed this, she bequeathed the trust 4,000 acres of the Lake District. Its current headquarters is called Heelis – her married name – in her honour.

But in recent years, something else has entered the fray. Now Covid-19 has brought it out into the open.

This week, two documents have found their way into the public domain. The first, from the NT director, Hilary Mcgrady, introduced a “consultation” on the “Reset Programme”. In plainer English, she means job cuts. The trust is losing £200 million this year, caused, she says, by the coronavirus.

There is the usual patter about biodiversity and carbon footprint, diversity and inclusion, “community”, Equality Impact Assessments, “unconscious bias” and “how the collections came to be” (which I take to be a coded reference to the profits of slavery). But in essence, the paper is lists and charts of lost jobs and new ways of working, mainly by centralisation. Food, for example, will come from “Whole Trust Delivery

Teams”, not from the land and gardens the trust owns.

Although the curators – the trust’s unique knowledge bank – will be cut by less than some areas, their expertise will diminish. Instead of being experts on one big thing, such as paintings, furniture, or textiles, they will be allocated to cover everything in a single century. This makes no sense when great houses have usually developed architecturally, and in their collections, over centuries. Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, for example, is Tudor, Jacobean and 18th century, with 19th-century alterations as well.

Behind Ms Mcgrady’s 41 pages lies an implied admission that the trust has overreached, nearly doubling over 10 years. It has been the Cecil Rhodes of heritage colonialism, grabbing too much, too fast. Now it has suffered a non-fatal but worrying cardiac arrest.

The other document is called “Towards a 10-year Vision for Places and Experiences. Version 2.1”. It is written by Tony Berry, the Trust’s Director of Visitor Experience. The first thing to note about the Berry plan is its visuals. There are pictures of children building sandcastles, a family travelling in a driverless car playing with screens through a futuristic urban landscape, robots, wheelchairs, and a mock-up of the Houses of Parliament being flooded by global warming. Nowhere is there an identifiable picture of a trust property. There is no photograph of a trust house at all.

That last point is presumably intended, since Mr Berry says that the “outdated mansion experience” has to go. He wants “revolution”, not “evolution”. Out goes the “asset-led approach (our primary role is to present the English country house as a distinctive part of our heritage)”. In comes the “audience-led approach”: houses should no longer be presented as “country house former homes” but “repurposed as public space in service of local audiences”. “Everywhere … we will move away from our narrow focus on family and art history.”

As for gardens, they will not just be beautiful places of tranquillity and “heritage”, but places of activity “where issues like climate change are acknowledged and tackled”. Perhaps some ingenious horticulturalist like the chap who produced the loganberry should develop a fruit called the berryberry in honour of Tony and his visitor experiences. It would be green at all times, and run through one’s system with frightening speed.

If Mr Berry’s ideas were to be pursued, several things would happen. First the donor families, many of whom inhabit part of their former house, or a house on the estate, would rebel. If their gift was being “repurposed as public space”, why should they continue, as many do, to lend its contents to the trust, or, on death, to transfer them to it as “acceptance in lieu” of tax, instead of selling them on the open market?

Second, the Berry vision might break the great National Trust Act of Parliament of 1937, specifically designed to rescue country houses for the nation. It would also call into question the unique privilege granted to the trust by its original Act of Parliament of 1907, which states that no property once given to the trust can be taken away from it except by the will of Parliament. Why should the trust be allowed to keep buildings whose historic interest it disregards?

Finally, National Trust members are usually fascinated by the family stories in its properties, as part of the human dimension and historical context. They do not see most of the properties as neutral backcloths for entertainment, let alone for lectures about the environment. They like their romance and their narrative. Mr Berry loves using the word “narratives”. He says people are searching for “narratives to define their own identities”. Yet he never mentions the great common historical, social and geographical identity in all these places – the word “Britain”.

It should, in fairness, be said that the gleam in Mr Berry’s eye is not the agreed policy of the National Trust. Ms Mcgrady has hurried to point this out. But his views are not untypical of those who talk of “visitor experience” and “interpretation”, yet seem actively to dislike the real experience of a place with a history – a history which, all too often, they seem proud not to know, and therefore cannot interpret.

This is a problem much more widespread than the National Trust – a problem in schools and universities and parts of the public services and the BBC. It is a culture – or rather a lack of culture – which needs to change.

Here is the full sentence from Beatrix Potter from which I quoted earlier. “The Trust,” she said, “is a noble thing, and humanly speaking – immortal. There are some silly mortals connected with it; but they will pass.”

*The National Trust covers the whole of the UK except for Scotland. The Scottish National Trust is a wholly separate body.