As the National Trust takes over Rules, London’s oldest restaurant, I have a vague feeling of dread. Like many people, I mildly dislike the National Trust, whose idea of ‘inclusion’ always feels like Beatrice Webb handing out gifts to the servants in 1905. The people they’re trying to target don’t want to be patronised. And if you want to be ‘accessible’, cutting your ticket prices or laying on bus services for people without cars would be far more useful, if alas more costly, than prattling about Black History Month on your social media.
Does the Trust realise that Rules is a place which at least until recently specialised in serving things which have been shot? How does that square with its bien-pensant worldview? Will the menus soon alert us to the exploitative, colonialist nature of the venison chop? (Admittedly, Rules’ current online menu, at the height of the shooting season, already seems to contain almost no game, though in the menus presented at table there is often a bit of paper stuck in the corner with the gamey offerings.)
My greater concern is based on what’s happened since the Trust took over another even more precious and far more foundational historic place from almost exactly the same era earlier this year. Rather below the radar, it has assumed control of the ten museums in and around Ironbridge Gorge, in Shropshire, complete with a £9 million government grant.
Perhaps that was all a bit too theme park for the Brahmins of the Trust
Ironbridge Gorge has one of the strongest claims to be the place where the Industrial Revolution, and the modern world, began. It was here that Abraham Darby developed the first economically viable method of mass-producing cast iron, and where his grandson built the first big structure, a bridge, made of the material, attracting a huge hive of industries, many pioneering, to the gorge. In 1986, it became, with six other places, Britain’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
As soon as the Trust took over, all the museums were closed for three months for ‘rebranding’ and ‘installation of National Trust IT’. Two, plus a cafe, reopened in May. Three more are now back, two with limited hours. The other five, including Darby’s home, have remained shut, apart from the occasional open day. The main site, Blists Hill, a replica Victorian town, now requires prebooking for most of the day and stopped all group and coach party bookings for most of the summer.
I visited Blists Hill on a sunny Sunday in mid-September. It wasn’t terrible, but it was a bit lifeless, and not just because you have to book. Everything which used to move and make noise – the clay mine railway, the steam winding engine, the Victorian fairground, the inclined lift – was still and silent. One of the staff told me that the Trust had ‘stopped all steam while it goes through its procedures’. Many of the demonstrations seem to have ended. The staff who used to wander round in period costume were mostly gone, perhaps among the 50 redundancies the Trust has made. The brickworks and the blast furnace were closed.
They’ve stopped the enjoyable custom of letting visitors change their money into old Victorian pennies which you could use to buy things in the shops or the pub, though a notice in the bank promised something along these lines would return. Direct wokery was muted, but large numbers of posters demanding votes for women had been placed in the shops and on the municipal noticeboards, probably not something that most traders in an industrial town would have put in their shop windows at this time, or most local councils would have allowed on their noticeboards. The shops contained mostly generic National Trust tat.
Blists Hill boasts in a display on the site that in 2013 it was voted the second-best attraction in the world on TripAdvisor. Many of the reviews now (with an uptick in October) make grim reading:
It’s been typically NTd, introducing a more sterile environment.
Very disappointing and not the immersive experience I was expecting… surprisingly quiet and ordinary – it felt like walking down a normal street.
Before the National Trust took it over Blists Hill was brilliant… it’s now just bricks and mortar. All the life has gone out of it.
Genuinely disappointing… feels soulless.
The Trust says it does want to reopen the other sites. I get, too, that it inherited an institution in financial difficulty – though since the cause of that was lower post-Covid visitor numbers, it makes little sense to discourage visitors in the way the new owners have. Demonstrating the Trust’s usual contrast between political posturing on inclusion and practical action to bring it about, there was also zero information on its Ironbridge website about public transport, even though the council put on a special bus service this summer connecting most of the sites.
Under its previous management Blists Hill was, in fact, a place which got what the Trust claims to want – lots of working-class visitors – because it was about the lives of ordinary people, because they allowed coach parties and because it was fun. The kids could go on the Victorian fairground rides and watch the steam train. You could buy fish and chips or a drink in the pub with old Victorian money and talk to a bloke dressed up as a miner. Perhaps that was all a bit too theme park for the Brahmins of the Trust. Now, I suspect, the influx of NT members on their free passes has made it rather more middle-class than it was before. Well done, National Trust.
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