‘For £3,000 you can be told how guilty you should be’: Why members are deserting the National Trust

George Chesterton reports in the Daily Telegraph on reactions to membership price increases by the National Trust, ‘As costs soar and members flee, has the charity sold out its legacy for “woke” politics?’

Many houses are part-closed as volunteer numbers have dropped.

The National Trust has become a lightning rod for criticism over its attempts to “decolonise” its properties and foster social justice activism, and for placing historical links with the slave trade at the forefront of its conservation work.

Add to this the loss of 89,000 members between 2023 and 2024, and this week’s membership price rise – an increase of nearly 6 per cent – and you have a recipe for a genuine crisis for an institution founded in 1895 to protect numerous properties and landmarks of immense historical and cultural significance across England and Wales. Today, it manages more than 500 sites.

“If members were confident all their money was being spent on vital conservation work, the increase in membership price would have been understandable,” tweeted Zewditu Gebreyohanes, a senior researcher at the Prosperity Institute and former director of the grass-roots group Restore Trust, on Wednesday. “Yet, with access to historic houses being reduced even as controversial and irrelevant activities are pursued, trust in the organisation’s management is at an all-time low.”

Accusations that “woke” culture has infiltrated the heritage and conservation charity have been made for some years now, and even the former chair, Sir Simon Jenkins, warned last year that the organisation was failing to get the balance right on cultural issues.

In 2021  it was reported that volunteers had been asked to wear rainbow-coloured clothes and lanyards at Ickworth in Suffolk during Pride month. In other controversies, Christian ­holidays have been excluded from an “inclusivity and well-being” ­calendar, and a plant-based menu has been promoted in cafés, a decision which was regarded as emblematic of a preoccupation with ideology over the core function of preserving and promoting Trust properties, something hardly helped when the director-general, Hilary McGrady, declared, “Seventy per cent of my staff and volunteers would be regarded as progressive activists”.

Telegraph readers have been quick to register their disapproval at its policies and the new price rises (a single adult yearly pass rose by £19.40 to £96.20). “The National Trust simply doesn’t talk to its members,” writes Heather Erridge. “They act like an overbearing parent and assume they know what’s best for members, and hence numbers are dropping.”

Another writes, “The National Trust has shot itself in the foot, or rather its woke board has. People have left in droves, as have volunteers. Most houses are now so denuded of volunteers they can’t fully open. We will be leaving as our membership expires in August.”

Historian Prof Lawrence Goldman, meanwhile, says the Trust takes a one-sided view of history.  “I’ve been going to National Trust properties for decades so my criticism is that they often ignored the history of their properties. No context provided, very few labels on exhibits, and it didn’t care to explain its history to its visitors,” says the professor, who stood as a candidate for the National Trust Council last year. “And then suddenly, after Black Lives Matter, it became interested.

“But it was a skewed version of history in which they pointed the finger at all these terrible people from the past who had some vague connection with the properties. But even then, they never explained the full context of the properties, the families and the estates. In the process, national history is distorted. Speaking as an academic historian, this is the worst of all worlds. When they finally take an interest in history, they do it terribly.”
 

The falling membership, leaving it with around 5.38 million members, has been ascribed in part to this seeming emphasis on the role of slavery and colonialism in its properties and the families who once owned them, leading to some critics to accuse them of being “anti-British”. In 2020, McGrady oversaw the publication of a research document on the subject, and she revealed in 2022 that she had received death threats in response to the policy, which disclosed links at 93 properties to colonialism or the slave trade. John Orna-Ornstein, the director of culture and engagement, said at the time that it was about raising awareness. “Just to be really clear, we’re not making judgments about the past; what we’re trying to do is reflect as accurately and comprehensively as we can the histories across a variety of places.”

The report outlined links to plantation owners and others who received compensation during abolition. It includes properties with connections to people involved in colonial expansion, including figures from the East India Company or Winston Churchill’s home, Chartwell. It also featured properties with cultural links to Britain’s colonial history, such as Rudyard Kipling’s home in Sussex.

“For £3,000 you can be told how bad your ancestors were and how guilty you should be,” writes Telegraph reader Colin Cowan, citing the new price charged for a lifetime family membership.

By seemingly becoming more overly political in the past decade, the National Trust has created a perennial problem for itself, an institution with a primary conservative mission: to preserve and promote historical sites and buildings for posterity.

“The context surrounding the membership price hike is very important,” Gebreyohanes told The Telegraph. “It is worth noting that lots of the sites in the National Trust’s care are less accessible than ever, with prebooking required rather than members being able to make impromptu visits; car-parking prices rising steadily; a ticket to enter the historic house being required in order to access gardens and estates, whereas grounds were formerly usually accessible without a ticket; and historic houses being shut to the public for much more of the year than they used to, including sometimes permanent closure due to years of neglect. The high levels of dissatisfaction with the Trust’s management is reflected in the ongoing exodus of members and volunteers.”

With annual costs for an adult pass hitting £96.20 and the price of a lifetime family membership now £3,025, it means this week’s price rises have contributed to an almost 25 per cent increase in three years. Rather than a blanket percentage rise across all membership types, fees have risen by between an above-inflation 4.8 per cent and 5.7 per cent. At the same time, the National Trust has just advertised for a part-time head of inclusion and belonging with “a specific focus on race awareness and equity”. The eventual holder of the position will be able to work from home for half its allocated hours.

“I’ve been a joint member for decades, but gave up because of the woke nonsense,” writes Telegraph reader Suzanne Norman. “British history should be portrayed and preserved truthfully, not distorted to fit some modern woke ideology.”

Some readers’ loyalty towards the institution – often a relationship of decades – means there are those prepared to overlook its misgivings. “I agree with a lot of the sentiments here about the recent attitude of the NT towards DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], slavery and reparations, which should form no part of the NT’s policies,” writes Liz Whitman. “However, I love visiting NT properties and am truly grateful that so much of our most beautiful and precious countryside and coastline has been protected so I am prepared to overlook the things I don’t like.”

“I have stuck with my membership despite the rising cost, the institutional wokeness,” adds Jeffrey Hobbs. “I want to retain a stake in our British heritage. Hopefully the silly wokeness will pass soon.”

There are some positives for the under-fire charity, with visitors to its sites across England, Wales and Northern Ireland who pay on the door – non-members – rising by 12 per cent in 2023-24 compared with the previous year. It said total visitor numbers were also up by 5 per cent, to 25.3 million.

Still, many critics continue to vote with their feet. “It should be an organisation for everybody and it’s alienating to start pointing fingers of blame or taking that posture to the past,” says Prof Goldman. “We should be informing, not judging. It shouldn’t be treating history as a Manichean struggle between good and ill – not to mention trashing the reputation of the families who lived in the houses or built the houses and in many cases gave the houses to the National Trust.”

“It is one of the organisations in the heritage sector that is destroying its own reputation and its own base in the nation,” says Prof Goldman. “These remarkable buildings, paintings and artefacts should be used to integrate the nation and bring us together to understand our shared history and culture. But we are doing the reverse. We are using culture as a wedge.”

A National Trust spokesman said: “We set all our prices carefully, based on what it costs to carry out our conservation and other work. Operating costs have soared in recent years in the challenging external financial context. In our last financial year, our operating costs grew by £53.2 million.”