IN my article of March 6, I suggested that English Heritage had outdone the National Trust in wokery by its claim that Hadrian’s Wall symbolised LGBT history.
The National Trust has now responded in an attempt to regain its woke clown crown.
For several years the Trust has seen itself as the custodian of the weather. ‘Climate change is one of the most important issues facing society’, it claims.
In 2020 the Trust’s Executive Board and Trustees ‘recognised the urgent nature’ of the climate crisis and decided to establish a climate change programme with a governing Climate Change Board.
As part of its drive to become Net Zero by 2030, the Trust has recently boasted about its plans for a new ‘Welcome Centre’ at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. Shugborough is one of 93 properties shamed by it in September 2020 for having links to colonialism and/or slavery.
The ‘vision’ of its architects, the Citizens Design Bureau, is for the centre to be a curved eco-lodge built from straw bales. I am no architect. My knowledge of straw-built houses comes from Corinthians 1 3: 12, ‘For no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay or straw, his workmanship will be evident because the day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will prove the quality of each man’s work.’ I also remember the cautionary tale of the collapsing houses in a story concerning three little pigs and a big bad wolf. Perhaps straw technology has improved of late and the new building will survive fires and hungry wolves.
The plans for Shugborough also include ‘rationalised (sic) parking facilities that enables the estate to be traffic-free’ and, of course, gender-neutral lavatories.
In a further perverse interpretation of its role to conserve our nation’s important properties and contents, the Trust has recently decided that the best way to do that is to get rid of them.
It is in the process of dispersing the collection of steam locomotives formerly housed at Penrhyn Castle in North Wales. With the exception of one, the engines have been sent to suitable locations in the UK. However, a unique Black-Hawthorn saddle tank, Kettering Furnaces Number 3, built in 1885, has inexplicably been given to the Waterford and Suir Valley Railway in the Irish Republic. This is despite the offer of a much more appropriate home at the Irchester Narrow Gauge Museum ten miles from the locomotive’s original base in Northamptonshire.
Perhaps the National Trust is testing the waters for a wholesale dispersal to foreign parts of donations considered inappropriate in its weird woke mindset.
