The catastrophic dumbing-down of the National Trust has plumbed new depths. The latest initiative by the infantilised morons who run what was once the world’s greatest conservation charity? ‘Pokémon in Partnership with National Trust.’
‘Are you ready for an adventure?’ the Trust’s website declares. ‘Get outdoors with our Pokémon Trading Card Game Mega Evolution Trails. Complete the trails to find Mega Evolution Pokémon, discover their powers and complete fun challenges.’
From 23 May, 15 of the Trust’s sublime houses, with their Elysian landscapes, will become a playground for a vast Japanese media franchise. Those heavenly landscapes, carved out by man at his aesthetic heights, will be blighted by man at his trashy, commercial low. Because, as the Trust’s website proudly boasts, ‘You’ll also get to take a photo in front of the Mega Evolution Pokémon backdrop at the end.’
How horrified descendants of former owners will be to see how the Trust has wrecked its divine inheritance
Dyrham Park, Wimpole Hall, Kingston Lacy, Belton, Blickling Hall, Belton House… Some of the greatest combinations of house and landscape on the planet. Now just ace settings for children’s games.
There’s nothing wrong with children playing Pokémon. We all go through phases of toy obsessions when growing up. I was surgically attached to my Evil Knievel motorbike as a five-year-old. But I didn’t expect Sissinghurst and Bodiam Castle – the National Trust sites where I passed a lot of my childhood – to provide dedicated Evil Knievel launchpads off Vita Sackville-West’s Elizabethan tower or Bodiam’s gatehouse crenellations.
There’s also nothing wrong with children playing at National Trust houses. That’s what I did at Sissinghurst and Bodiam, without the Trust bending over backwards and stooping to my low level. For I was in possession of that universal quality among children: imagination. Just the sight of Sissinghurst’s tower or Bodiam’s crenellations set off thoughts of jousting knights or boiling oil poured over attacking armies.
Private country houses – and English Heritage properties – have worked this out. Millions of visitors will come and use their imaginations if you leave those epic houses and landscapes as they are. Only the National Trust is ashamed of its history. Leaf through its magazine, and you’ll barely see an old house, except as a backdrop to some carefully curated, supposed ‘adventure’.
Try reading their guides and the moment they make a stab at history, they insert spelling mistakes and appalling howlers. At Disraeli’s house, Hughenden – one of the poor, benighted sites where the Pokémon horrors will be inflicted – they couldn’t even spell Disraeli’s name right on their laminated guides.
More and more, the Trust treats its delicate houses as embarrassing repositories of dull history, which happen to have absolutely fab running-around areas for the kids to have fun in. At Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, an elegant, classical Restoration house, they’ve taken that idea to its logical, horrific conclusion and turned it into ‘The Children’s Country House at Sudbury’.
‘Having fun with history,’ the Trust says of Sudbury. Erm, no, in fact it’s ‘Jettisoning history in favour of crass nightmares’. In the Hall’s charming ground-floor saloon, children now dress up and dance. It has been transformed into a disco room, with a mirror ball dangling from the ceiling. A neon sign screams out the idiot line, ‘Party like it’s 1699’.
Crashingly unfunny speech bubbles have been slapped on to the house’s portrait collection, confecting a row between Sudbury’s old inhabitants. ‘Don’t listen to old Babs over there,’ says one speech bubble.
One of these days, I’ll throw an orange at her frame. Trying to look thoughtful posing with her head on her hand. She don’t know the meaning of the word. Always thinking she’s better than the rest of us girlfriends, ain’t that right, Louise?
What cretin was allowed to compose those sentences and have them broadcast to the world?
Country houses – along with our churches – are Britain’s greatest contribution to world art and architecture. They are unique capsules: the finest buildings, with the greatest art, brought together by extraordinary families. Those families gave their houses to the nation because they thought – correctly at the time – that the National Trust could look after them better than they could with their dwindling bank accounts.
How horrified their descendants will be to see how the Trust has wrecked its divine inheritance. When it isn’t desecrating houses with cheap, misunderstood versions of what they think children will like, they are literally wrecking them.
Clandon Park in Surrey, a fine, Palladian house, burnt down in 2015. Rather than rebuilding it with their insurance payout, the brain-numbingly foolish Trust are preserving it as a ruin for ever.
At least those unbeautiful Pokémon backdrops will be in time removed from those National Trust sites, returning their parks to their pristine condition. But the fools will remain in charge, fixing their dim, ugly veneers over their unprized treasures for the foreseeable future.
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