Written Evidence submitted by the National Trust

 

The big challenges facing society today are not that different from those our founders were trying to overcome in Victorian Britain. Our founders had a vision to restore the health of society, based on the simple and enduring idea that people need historic, beautiful and natural places.

We believe everyone in 21st century Britain can benefit from a dose of this natural health service antidote. Of course, life has changed and so too has the role that the Trust needs to play. To us, this means:

 

  1. We care for over 500 properties comprising over 50,000 individual buildings, over 700 miles of coastline and 247,000 hectares of land. Our total visitor figures, including our free access properties, are estimated at over 100 million annually. We receive no statutory subsidy, and in our last financial year obtained an income of over £500,000,000 through our activities – which we could not achieve without our 4.8 million members and 65,000 volunteers.
     
  2. Partnership working is at the heart of everything we do, and helps us make the most of our special places. We have worked in partnership with Sport England since 2012 and with Arts Council England since 2009. We co-ordinate a broad coalition to deliver Heritage Open Days, and join with a diverse range of groups to embed our places at the heart of their local communities. The Trust is an almost unique delivery partner, because we look after more than 500 places rooted in their local communities that add up to something far greater nationally. Many of our larger scale projects are therefore delivered across our network of places in partnership with public bodies, and this allows us to reach a far greater number of people than we could alone.
     
  3. Our response focuses on those areas of greatest relevance to the Trust. We set out below examples of our programmes that have broadened access beyond our traditional audiences and successfully demonstrate positive social impact. Of the Committee’s five major themes, our core purpose is best suited to address the social impacts of participation on health, community engagement and diversity.

 

 

Health

  1. To help more people realise the benefits of participation in sport, the National Trust works with a variety of partners to create greater entry level sporting opportunities, which we believe are key to encouraging more people to get active. Our partnerships include national governing bodies like British Cycling, England Athletics, Archery GB and British Canoe. We have worked in partnership with Sport England since 2012, and they invested over £4.2 million to help our places cater towards people’s outdoor activity needs. In February 2016, they provided a £2 million grant to create ten new cycle trails on our properties, and in 2017, they renewed their partnership with us to 2021. This partnership is critical to helping us maximise the reach of our Active Outdoors programme. This partnership has helped us reach nearly four times as many people, and there has been a sixfold increase in the number of Active Outdoors events we host. 
     
  2. Parkrun now takes place at 29 of our properties each week, bringing 135,000 unique visits each year. This includes more than 7,600 children taking part in Junior Parkruns. Fifteen of our sites also offer Trust10, a free 10k trail run route, and more than 22,000 people have completed a T10 run event. In addition to our regular sport offerings, in 2016, we launched a Summer of Sport campaign to coincide with the Rio Olympics. Supported by Sport England, this programme is aimed at giving visitors a chance to try a variety of outdoor activities at our places over the summer and record their achievements. It is now an annual event on our calendar and includes both one-off family sports days and scheduled programmes of regular events during the summer holidays. In summer 2017, more than 63,000 people took part.
     
  3. We know that taking part in these activities has a positive impact. Just over a quarter of our runners and cyclists are new to the sport, and nearly 40% of Summer of Sport participants were trying an activity for the first time. A third of our games participants are fairly inactive, having done 30 minutes exercise less than twice in the previous month. Encouragingly, 88% of our participants say that they feel encouraged to be more active and 80% would take part in sport with us again.
     
  4. The Trust is also keen to maximise the health benefits of our cultural portfolio. The Trust is a partner in the pioneering Human Henge project, working with the Restoration Trust, English Heritage and Bournemouth University. Underpinned by the concept of therapeutic landscape, this programme provides ten weekly walks in the Stonehenge and Avebury landscapes for a facilitated group of individuals experiencing mental health difficulties, accompanied by archaeologists and museum staff. The third pilot scheme is currently running at Avebury, providing privileged access to cultural assets and expertise. We believe cultural participation has significant therapeutic value in improving mental health and wellbeing – almost 60% of Human Henge participants so far felt it had a positive impact on their health.

 

 

 

 

Community Engagement and Diversity

  1. The National Trust has a commitment to lifelong engagement, and seeks to ensure that our places can move, teach and inspire everyone.
     
  2. Our National Public Programming aims to increase the relevance and resonance of the National Trust to people’s lives and facilitate contemporary debate around challenging issues of place and identity. Each year we aim to explore a different issue, actively challenging and looking at established narratives associated with our places. We are delving deeper into little exposed themes, addressing the underrepresentation of marginalised and hidden histories.
     
  3. Last year, our theme was Prejudice and Pride: Exploring LGBTQ heritage. We know that LGBTQ heritage plays an important role in our places. Research tells us that people who identify at LGBTQ visit historic places in significant numbers, but also that many feel excluded from what they see and are less likely to want to engage further. We sought to change this, telling new stories at twelve of our places. This work was advised and supported by our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ+) Staff Network, which helped the Trust in its development of responses to marginalised and contested histories. The work of this Staff Network contributed greatly to the National Trust winning ‘Best Expo’ at the Bristol Pride Awards 2017.
     
  4. We are committed to fully evaluating the impact of Prejudice and Pride, in conjunction with our academic partner, the University of Leicester. In May 2018, we will be publishing that evaluation, which we would be happy to share with the Committee. This year, our theme is Women and Power, and 100 of our Places are highlighting their women’s stories. By taking a strategic national approach and identifying a unifying theme across our properties, we believe we can maximise the impact of cultural participation, reaching out to audiences who may have felt excluded.
     
  5. We are also committed to improving access at our places. At Croome Park, for instance, we ran the ‘Croome Co-Creates’ initiative, which worked with a group of profoundly disabled children to interpret Croome Park. We wanted to collaborate in a way that was meaningful, not tokenistic, to create a visitor experience that could be enjoyed by everyone. Staff from four specialist schools were consulted to plan the visits in a way that supported the needs of the children and ensure all staff, parents and carers were prepared. Thirty five children came to Croome, and staff watched and noted their moments of joy as they explored the parkland. This identified twelve key sensory opportunities. Next, the children were asked to select an artist to illustrate a new map that would appeal to their view of the world, signalling their preference through non-verbal communication. The successful artist, William Hanekom, was commissioned to draw the new site map. The result of this was a boost in repeat visits and visitors with additional needs, with over 600 new family visits in the five months since it was launched.
     
  6. In other cases, our work seeks to empower communities by exploring histories that may have traditionally been ignored. In July 2016, for example, we explored the contemporary heritage of Croydon and cast a spotlight on the borough as one of the most important examples of post-war ambition to build a new society. We ran tours in some of Croydon’s most iconic buildings and the surrounding new town area, aiming to change the perception of heritage from country houses and coastlines, celebrating the real places in which people live, work and play. By sparking a debate about what is special and cherished in suburban places, we believe we can boost access and ensure the National Trust is relevant to audiences who may not have engaged with us previously.
     
  7. As well as national scale partnerships, we also operate locally. At Hinton Ampner, for example, a small group of women who were evacuated there during World War II provided the basis for a powerful exhibition. The property sought to tell their story, by speaking to the women and capturing their quotes on boards that could be displayed, with comment cards for visitors to provide their thoughts on the women’s experiences. Some of the evacuees staffed the exhibition, providing a level of direct emotional engagement that made the project all the more powerful. The project proved truly intergenerational, welcoming school children to experience the activities the women had participated in as evacuees. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive and highlights the effectiveness of truly local partnerships.
     
  8. Our work at places such as Rainham Hall, located in an industrial part of the Outer London Borough of Havering, has taken partnership working one step further with at least 60% of all exhibits and installations on display for the public being co-curated or co-created with local partners and volunteers. The Hall exhibitions change every 18-24 months to focus on a different era or inhabitant, cultivating plenty of opportunities for participatory design. Local community groups create artworks, sound installation recordings, do historical research, make costumes and models. The current exhibition is based entirely memories captured via an oral history project from people who attended a state-run day nursery for local children between 1943-1954.  Reminiscences of playtime and the wartime nursery at the Hall have inspired textile art creations, film recordings, interactive telephone handset displays, text panels and more. The nearly three-acre Community Gardens at Rainham Hall are a free-to-enter green urban oasis, and our Community Gardener matches every zone and project in the grounds with a different local group to help shape and develop – from police cadets, to members of the local branch of the National Autistic Society, and other local charities such as Treetops which support adults with learning difficulties.
     
  9. We have also sought to reach out to more diverse audiences through partnership working and community engagement. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, our ‘Whose Story?’ project pioneered more inclusive ways of working by connecting the National Trust to local BAME communities in rural and urban areas across the West Midlands. We trialled a Community Ambassador initiative, recruiting individuals who were well connected within our target audiences, who can motivate and encourage a network of supporters to spread the word about the National Trust and promote volunteering opportunities. Other outcomes were longer term projects. At Wightwick Manor, a Caribbean Herb Garden was established, which is managed by BAME volunteers and embedded in the day to day visitor operation. Volunteers designed and planned the garden, and lead tours and tasting sessions. The ‘Whose Story?’ project welcomed more than 3,500 new visitors to our places, 800 participants in our events and recruited 150 new volunteers.
     
  10. Learning from this experience, between 2013 and 2017 the Trust pioneered a new Volunteer Management Traineeship Programme, which recruited 17 full time paid trainees to a variety of our places to reach new audiences and diversify our volunteering opportunities. By taking a ‘no experience necessary approach to recruitment’, 61% of trainee applicants were between 16-25 or from a BAME background. Over half of the trainees eventually recruited were from these groups. They bought a fresh approach to engagement, with a number of projects establishing links between places and their local communities. In Erddig, for instance, a trainee created an ‘Erdigg on Tour’ programme, recognising that transport and access was a considerable barrier to visiting in rural Wales. This created a small team of volunteers who developed stories of the property and gave talks to local community groups. The talks programme was fully booked and raised £500 for the property, which is being used to support more school visits.
     
  11. We have also sought to engage with more diverse audiences through participation. For the Trust, ‘participation’ means meaningful active engagement with our communities, where they have an active role in co-creating and deciding what do with us. One example of this was our engagement with Fun Palaces, which has been an annual event since 2014. Fun Palaces is a movement promoting community at the heart of culture, with a weekend of arts and science action created by, for and with local people. In October 2017, 362 Fun Palaces were made by 13,750 local people with approximately 126,000 participants. Around  90% of Fun Palaces each year were outside London and the Trust were involved with a number of them, including hosting a Fun Palace at the National Trust’s HQ in Heelis, Swindon, which had over 250 attendees. Overall, it was estimated that 18.6% attendees at Fun Palaces were from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities; and the Trust is exploring and building on this model as way of actively engaging with more diverse audiences. Through initiatives such as Fun Palaces, as well as a range of emerging opportunities through volunteering which often reflect local priorities and needs, the Trust is increasing its engagement with more diverse backgrounds - especially those from BAME and more disadvantaged communities.
     
  12. One of our most powerful tools for boosting access and improving cultural participation is Heritage Open Days (HODs). The National Trust is a longstanding participant in England’s biggest and most popular voluntary cultural event, which sees places and properties that are usually closed or charge an entrance fee open their doors and stage events for free. In 2017, more than 2.5 million visitors were welcomed to 5,588 events, staffed by an army of 46,400 volunteers. Our HODs link to our National Public Programming theme, ensuring as many people as possible take part in those challenging debates, and we commission full evaluation of their impact. In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, half of our surveyed HOD sites report a more diverse audience, and nearly a third report more local people coming through the doors on these days. The audience is more evenly spread across the generations, with more low income households attending. Some 40% of visitors had not visited a heritage site before in the previous year, and this rises to 56% amongst low income visitors.
     
  13. The National Trust co-ordinates Heritage Open Days, with funding provided by the players of the People’s Postcode Lottery – this partnership is critical to ensuring we can deliver such a large number of events right across the country. It has allowed us to maximise the impact of HODs. Two thirds of visitors strongly agree that it makes them appreciate their local area more, and three quarters say it makes them feel more part of the local community. More than 80% learned something new about their areas, and 78% learned something new about the culture, history or heritage of this country. HOD attendees become more engaged, with 80% saying they felt inspired to visit more cultural or heritage sites in the future, and between £5.3 and £10.5 million of benefit was generated for local economies. We believe Heritage Open Days is a powerful tool in the fight to reach non-traditional audiences, and we encourage as many venues as possible to join with us and open their doors to even more people next year.
     
  14. Our partnership with the Arts Council England is a powerful tool for connecting people with history and heritage in new ways. Trust New Art is a programme of Contemporary Arts inspired by National Trust places. We work with artists across all artforms from visual arts to dance and performance. 82% of our visitors agree that it is a good idea to have contemporary art on site, and over two thirds of our visitors saying that the contemporary arts had a real emotional impact on them, over two thirds saying that the art made them think about the setting in a different way and 96% describing their experience of the arts as enjoyable or very enjoyable. Our work with artists has enabled us to connect with our communities in creative and meaningful ways – from school children participating in creative activities to community groups contributing to large artworks and taking part in performative events provoking discussion and debate.
     
  15. This submission is only able to give a snapshot of the extraordinary work going on across the country to help more people access our places than ever before: we would be happy to discuss this work with the Committee.

 

February 2018