The National Trust – once an admirable institution dedicated to saving historic buildings and landscapes – appears to have let those aims slide long ago. These days, the Trust seems much more interested in politics, as visitors to the Labour party conference in Liverpool discovered this week.
When delegates came out of Lime Street Station, they were confronted by a huge poster for the National Trust. What did it show? One of its sublime country houses, perhaps, or one of those ancient landscapes? Nope. Instead, there was a bleak picture of Dunwich Heath, Suffolk, scorched by wildfires this summer. Along with it were the words ‘Climate Change is Here – The Government must do more to restore nature, for all our futures.’
Well, in fact, it’s yet to be proved that the fires on Dunwich Heath were caused by climate change, as opposed to arson or a picnicker’s barbecue. But even if climate change does turn out to be the reason for the fire, why on earth is the Trust spending thousands of pounds of members’ hard-earned money, telling the government what to do?
In any case, the Labour government has already fully embraced a climate-change policy, most strikingly under Ed Miliband, the former Energy Secretary, promoting net zero and opposing North Sea oil – leaving us with some of the highest energy prices in the world. How Labour expects to re-industrialise Britain with such soaring energy costs is a great mystery.
— Celia Richardson (@CeliaRichards0n) September 29, 2026The Prime Minister makes his 1st speech to Conference as Labour leader in 45 minutes. Arrivals are being greeted outside Lime Street Station with this National Trust message. It's colossal, as is the challenge. But we humans can do hard things if we face up to them & unite. pic.twitter.com/gdChtP7VXH
Still, at least Labour is a self-evidently political body, founded for that purpose. The National Trust is not and yet, increasingly, over the last 25 years, it has reinvented itself as an institution campaigning on all sorts of issues.
Slavery, gay rights, women’s rights: they are all, of course, of crucial historical importance. But the National Trust – with its illiterate signage and lack of historical knowledge – blunders and dumbs things down when it deals with political issues. At Hughenden, the home of the great Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, they couldn’t even spell his family’s surname properly.
Great private houses can do these things properly. At Harewood House, the Earl of Harewood put on a sensitive show about the horrors of slavery and how its proceeds contributed to his family fortune and the building of the house.
But these shows at private houses never eclipse the houses themselves. At the Trust, they increasingly ignore their own architectural treasures. Under the watch of Dame Helen Ghosh, Director-General of the Trust from 2012-18, the Trust went as far as removing furniture from the fine Regency library at Ickworth House, Suffolk, temporarily replacing it with beanbags. In 2015, Ghosh said that there was ‘so much stuff’ in Trust houses that it put people off; so exhibits had to be ‘simplified’.
Things have got worse elsewhere in the Trust, as they have accelerated their politics drive and ignored their houses. And inflicted their own babyish visions on them.
Literally babyish. Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire was turned into the Children’s Country House; for months, it was called the Childrens Country House, without an apostrophe, on the Trust’s illiterate website.
Sudbury’s elegant ground-floor saloon, an exercise in Restoration classicism, became a disco room, with a mirror ball dangling from the ceiling, next to a neon sign with the words ‘Party like it’s 1699’. And idiotic speech bubbles were attached to the hallowed family portraits of ancestors of the 10th Lord Vernon, who donated Sudbury.
In 2023, at Croome Court, an 18th-century, Palladian house in Worcestershire, misguided employees at the Trust handed out crayons to innocent children visitors. Surprise, surprise. Blue scribbles were soon found on the 18th-century sculpture of Sabrina, a Roman nymph, and a memorial to Capability Brown, who’d created the Croome landscape.
It’s yet to be proved that the fires on Dunwich Heath were caused by climate change
But the biggest disaster of all was the 2015 fire that destroyed Clandon Park, Surrey, built by Giacomo Leoni in 1730, a Palladian rarity owned by the Trust.
That fire certainly wasn’t caused by climate change – it was due to an electrical fault. The Trust duly collected the insurance money for the house and then madly, appallingly decided to conserve it as a wreck.
Here was a completely classic incarnation of the Trust’s founding aim in 1895: to “promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest”.
It has the money, and the necessary skilled craftsmen are there to carry out a full restoration – with the added chance of training new young craftsmen to do the job. That’s what they did after the fire at Uppark House, a Trust property, in 1989; they rebuilt it. And that’s what the Queen did after the Windsor Castle fire in 1992.
In those not so long ago days, no historic house-owner would think for a second of doing anything other than rebuilding a destroyed treasure. But the National Trust has long ago parted sense with its founding credo. Its leaders would far prefer to hobnob with leading politicians at conferences than preserve the things it was founded to save.
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