Can We Trust the National Trust?

Anyone interested in our history and heritage must be alarmed at the recent leak of an internal document suggesting that the National Trust may be contemplating a drastic change of policy. 

                                       Kingston Lacy House, a National Trust Property in Dorset.

The Times reports that the NT is set to sack a whole top tier of art specialists, hold fewer exhibitions and keep only twenty of its five hundred historic houses continually open to the public. They are also planning to sack their education officers and discontinue affordable visits to their properties for schoolchildren. If that is true it sounds like a complete betrayal of the mission of the NT. Families gave or sold their properties to the NT on the understanding that they would be available for enjoyment by the whole public, in perpetuity.

A paper written by NT director Tony Berry, full of slick jargon that makes one shudder, proposes an “urgent review" of opening hours and the development of “new sources of experience-based income”. It recommends that the NT “dial down” its role as a cultural institution and instead aim to be “a gateway to the outdoors and nature for everyone”. It even suggests that the NT doesn't exist to give people an "outdated mansion experience" and that the NT should employ experts in "repurposing" buildings. So the properties will become venues for hire. And who will hire them, for what purpose? 

          I have seen this sort of Disneyfication in action in France. The last time I visited the chateau of Versailles it was being used to display the pop-art of Jeff Koons. Displaying it anywhere is ghastly enough but putting it in Versailles was criminal damage.

         Tony Berry's ideas sound dire, a combination of dumbing-down, popularizing, monetizing and making the NT a shop window for "woke" political correctness. 

         Recently visitors to certain NT properties have noticed an irritating tendency to harp on fashionable themes. At Kingston Lacy in Dorset which I visited last week, the guide leaflet put a lot of emphasis on the fact that in the 18th century (a hundred years after the house was built) one member of the Bankes family married a woman whose inheritance derived from slavery. Its website gives prominence to the same information. Would we think it necessary to apologize for a Roman villa or for the Acropolis in Athens because they were undoubtedly built by civilizations that used slaves? We could say the same about the Taj Mahal or the Egyptian Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. Putting this in a short 2-page leaflet for visitors is rather like telling them, "Don't you dare enjoy art or architecture or a day out without paying in the form of a jolly good twinge of guilt". And what about all the local Dorset folk who worked as builders, housemaids, footmen, gardeners etc? No mention of them.

        If NT buildings are "re-purposed" then they will only be available to those who can afford to hire them, not to the general public.

       It seems to me that all corporations are plagued by a compulsion to change what is working well already. This change is not consumer-driven and is often imposed despite the protests of people using the product. In the last couple of years, almost every website I use has been updated and made worse, while those in charge insist it is better and ignore the feedback. It seems to be a requirement for those who rise in management or design to be innovators, followers of a religion of "progress" that means constantly changing things for the sake of change. By urging innovation the bosses and web designers justify their existence and their lavish salaries. It is about them, not about us.

        Making art experts redundant does not inspire any trust at all in NT boss Hilary McGrady. Quite the reverse. Members of the NT should now be raising their concerns in an assertive way, and considering whether it would be worth renewing their subscriptions if fewer properties are going to be permanently open. 

We should all write to our MPs and ask for the Minister of Culture to take an active interest in upholding the public's right of access to what nominally belongs to us.

This is a link to one of the many petitions that are springing up online to call on the NT to abandon these retrograde plans. Keep an eye out for others.

National Trust! Please don't scrap Outdoor Learning and Education!

https://secure.avaaz.org/community_petitions/en/paul_forecast_east_of_england_regional_director__stop_the_scrapping_of_national_trust_outdoor_learning_and_education/thanks/

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/national-trust-restructuring-plan-job-cuts
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-trust-to-scrap-its-experts-hdmzlqbhd
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-trust-to-focus-on-outdoors-and-hold-fewer-exhibitions-in-properties-ten-year-strategy-reveals-wdsf2cm0b