In its latest bout of self-hatred, the National Trust has declared that ‘people from the global majority are widely under-represented in the outdoors, accounting for only 1 per cent of National Park visitors in 2019’. That’s despite 15 per cent of the population in England and Wales being represented by the global majority.
It’s one of the National Trust’s peculiar, masochistic tendencies that it isn’t happy with its members
And so, as part of their Walk Together Pathway, the Trust is training 24 people from the global majority to become ‘qualified walk leaders’. Why on earth do you need to be trained to lead a walk? How many qualifications do you need to say, ‘Let’s go for a walk on Saturday.’
With its customary love of patronising claptrap, the Trust declares, ‘Cost and access are key barriers encountered by people regardless of their ethnicity, but for people from the global majority, these challenges are coupled with a lack of representation in the outdoors, which leads to the feeling that they might not be welcome in outdoor spaces, as well as fear of discrimination and cultural differences.’
‘Cost and access’? Going for a walk is free and the United Kingdom is blessed with thousands of miles of free footpaths – not least on National Trust land.
And, as for ‘a lack of representation in the outdoors’, who needs representation on a walk? When the country is at its loveliest, it’s empty – just nature and you. In Pembrokeshire, on the Trust’s Stackpole Estate, I have spent my whole life, walking, biking and swimming, for thousands of hours. For the vast majority of those hours, I don’t see another soul. Heaven! I don’t need someone to represent me on walks. I just want some lovely emptiness to look at.
Global majority – meaning people of indigenous, African, Asian or Latin American descent, who make up around 85 per cent of the world’s population – is a perfectly useful term, when used in the right context.
But it’s illogical to apply the term to every single gathering of people anywhere in the world. Would you expect the number of people in, say, a Cumbrian pub to reflect the global majority exactly? Or the number of plumbers in Cornwall? Or the population of London – or the Orkneys?
Of course not. Humans are distributed unevenly across the United Kingdom and the world. And they are distributed in their leisure hours according to the things they like doing.
It’s one of the National Trust’s peculiar, masochistic tendencies that it isn’t happy with its members. Why? The Trust is fantastically successful – the biggest conservation society in the world, with over five million members.
Why can’t the Trust just get on with doing its job – preserving wonderful buildings and landscapes for those five million members to enjoy? Instead, it beats itself up for not having the right kind of members.
They’ve been at this game for years. A decade ago, I attended a seminar with senior National Trust figures and the heads of great museums and galleries. One chief of a famous museum declared herself shocked by a recent visit to Peckover House, a glorious 18th-century Trust property in Cambridgeshire. She was horrified, she said, that were no Polish visitors from nearby towns that had a high population of Polish workers in them.
What was the Trust supposed to do? Send its officers through the local towns, pick up local Poles and frogmarch them to Peckover?
If Poles, or anyone else, don’t want to visit an 18th-century building, why on earth should they?
The Trust also has a self-hating attitude over the age of its members. When Simon Jenkins was chairman, he described how a senior Trust employee was angry that most visitors to Trust employees were 50 or over. Jenkins said to him, ‘I hate to break it to you but most of us turn 50 eventually.’
In other words, people develop an interest – if they ever do – in lovely things like National Trust properties at different times of life. You can’t force them to love something. Just keep those places as beautiful as possible and people – over five million of them at the moment – will naturally be drawn to them.
And yet, while the Trust bashes itself about having the wrong sort of members, it lets those properties fall apart – failing in its overarching obligation.
One Trust house – Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, a fine exercise in Restoration classicism – has been wrecked and become a kiddies’ playground as the Children’s Country House. Croome Court, Worcestershire, has been vandalised by children, thanks to the Trust letting them run riot with crayons. And, in the Trust’s biggest dereliction of duty, Clandon Park, has been burnt out and not rebuilt, thanks to Trust policy.
It isn’t difficult for the Trust to get its act together. Stop hating yourself. Start loving your properties.
Comments