I must thank Harry Mount for alerting me to the National Trust’s forthcoming partnership with the Japanese cartoon leviathon Pokémon, although he provided no such early warning system for their partnership with the British cartoon character Shaun the Sheep in 2025. I was thrilled to see that one of my local Trust properties is taking part. In the 30 years since Pokémon’s launch in Japan, it has become a $90 billion media franchise, stretching across TV shows, films, video games, trading cards and toys, transcending barriers of language, nationality, age, class and sex. According to YouGov, one in five Brits has played Pokémon Go, rising to more than half of Gen Z. Being popular with people who aren’t like you doesn’t automatically make it ‘catastrophic dumbing down’.
If you have children, Pokémon is almost unavoidable. And sometimes we need to meet children where they are, to show them where we want them to go. I don’t entirely disagree that curation of the National Trust’s houses in recent years has been uneven. As the biographer of a pioneering female politician who was a self-described Victorian imperialist and anti-feminist, I know the importance of taking the past on its own terms. But distaste for the Trust’s offering for adults may blind us to its creative attempts to get families through the gates to enjoy time outdoors together in a way which is entirely in keeping with the history of these houses.
I live near two of the Trust’s most popular sites: Wimpole Hall (over 400,000 visitors a year) and Anglesey Abbey (over 460,000 visitors) according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions. I take my two children to both properties several times a year. A family day ticket for two adults and up to three children for Wimpole Hall costs £50. A family membership costs £176.40 a year. And while the Trust’s latest figures show a 39 per cent increase in 18–25-year-olds joining, during the cost-of-living crisis family memberships are the least likely to be renewed. In order to justify a membership fee from increasingly squeezed household budgets, you need fresh reasons to return, and it is quite an atypical child who happily returns to a historic house to see the house and garden design alone, unless there is something else to do.
So while we go to see the rare breeds at Wimpole Hall’s farm, we also love going to its Christmas lights every year. (Don’t worry, Christian carols feature in the music alongside secular festive songs.) My daughter particularly loves Anglesey Abbey’s sculpture trails, featuring brightly painted models of characters like Shaun the Sheep and the bear from Michael Rosen’s popular children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Children enthusiastically follow a trail when they might resist an invitation simply to go for a walk. And, crucially, they make children and their parents want to visit. Both those trails saw visitor numbers increase more than 50 per cent on the same period the previous year.
It is quite an atypical child who happily returns to a historic house to see the house and garden design alone, unless there is something else to do
A Japanese connection is entirely in keeping with the history and collections of the National Trust. Blicking Hall’s collection includes woodblock prints of Mount Fuji and a Japanese-inspired cabinet, while Belton House has Japanese lacquer caskets; both will be hosting Pokémon trails. Some of the Trust’s ‘Elysian landscapes’ which some Trust members don’t want to see polluted by Japanese cartoons were heavily influenced by Japanese garden design, including Cliveden and Tatton Park. The Trust’s annual Blossom Watch (an unusually wholesome social media trend) is inspired by Japanese cherry blossom trees imported into the UK in the late 19th century. Winkworth Arboretum, which will be hosting a Pokémon trail, has an avenue of cherry blossom trees and a display of Japanese azaleas introduced in the 1920s.
And it isn’t just the National Trust thinking creatively about how to engage young visitors. When Glasgow’s Burrell Collection redeveloped its galleries a few years ago, it did something I’d never seen in other museums: it used the space two feet off the ground, where children’s eyes and hands naturally rest but which is so often blank space, to give them things to look at and touch and learn from. When Ely Cathedral introduced digital guides, they included a family-friendly option which tells its 1000-year story so well that I couldn’t get my son to put his down.
It’s worth noting that the Natural History Museum has had a collaboration with Pokémon for some months. Not every collaboration will bring in new visitors or excite young people – but I welcome the ‘cretins’ trying something new and taking a risk. Perhaps some adults feel that childish things don’t belong in old places. But the Pokémon trails aren’t for them. They show children that they are welcome in these places. And without children, they are little better than mausoleums.
I will give the final word to my seven-year-old son. ‘What do you think of Wimpole Hall having a Pokémon trail this summer?’ His response? ‘AMAZING! When can we go?’
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