Culture Wars, the National Trust, and ‘Green Heritage’ in Britain

1 Who Owns the National Trust?

The National Trust was founded in 1895, part of a broader 19th century conservation movement which included the founding of a number of heritage and nature conservation charities such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877) and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (1889). Set against a background of perceived threats to the natural landscape through increasing industrialization, and the historic built environment through rapidly changing urban environments, the National Trust was founded with the aims of protecting both “natural” and built heritage; sites of “beauty or historic interest.”^[2] However, its objectives were never restricted solely to preserving the material culture of sites. Among the general purposes outlined in the first official National Trust Act in 1907 was the stated intention that its places should be used for “public recreation, resort or instruction,” showing how education (“instruction”) was a fundamental dimension of the Trust’s founding principles.^[3]

The Trust’s portfolio was greatly expanded as a result of The National Trust Act of 1937 which paved the way for the Country House Scheme, enabling the Trust to take ownership of numerous country estates. After the devastation of the First World War, the Great Depression, and changing social strata in Britain, the running of many large estates became untenable. Through new parliamentary acts, many were passed to the Trust which enabled families to avoid paying death duties (the taxes due on an individual’s estate after their death, now known as inheritance tax) and continue residing on site, providing properties were opened to the public for a certain number of days per year.^[4] As the Trust acquired more and more estates, places that had been private domestic spaces increasingly became “public,” accessible to a large subset of the post-war British population with increased leisure time and money.^[5] Further parliamentary acts, such as the National Heritage Act (1980) and commercial heritage tourism development from the 1980s onwards, meant that “aristocratic heritage came to be part of the national heritage.”^[6] The Trust remains a charity with 5.7 million members which cares for over 500 properties, gardens and nature reserves across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own National Trust).^[7]

Much of the criticism which was aired in the media around the publication of the report reflected strongly held views around what the Trust’s original founding purpose was. There was a sense that this purpose was solely concerned with material conservation, with commentators largely ignoring the Trust’s inclusion of “instruction” as a foundational principle, as outlined in its earliest act. There was a further sense that any such principles (erroneously understood though they were) should not have changed in the preceding 125 years, and recent actions did not reflect the wishes of members. Journalists at the Daily Telegraph in particular felt that the Trust had “lost its way” by publishing this report and that “[t]o question the historical reputation of properties in this way breaks faith with the families that donated them.” For the conservative newspaper, this represented a “politically correct agenda” which “reflects the liberal-left bias of Britain’s elite” and that the Trust’s “job is to conserve, not comment.”^[8] This accusation led to an investigation by the Charity Commission, the body that regulates charities in Britain and can remove charitable status. A year later, the Charity Commission cleared the Trust of any breach of conditions, and the Museums Association, through a freedom of information act request, found that the investigation had been launched on the back of just three complaints.^[9]

2 The Report: Reactions and Responses

While the connections between the British country house and histories of slavery, empire, and colonialism have been researched for some time, this has not been a prominent element of their public interpretation and presentation to the public.^[10] To some extent this mirrors Britain’s broader public memory of transatlantic slavery which, for much of the last two-hundred years, has been framed through a culture of abolition, where abolition and emancipation acts have been commemorated and (predominantly parliamentary) figures of the abolition movements celebrated. The longer history of transatlantic slavery and its more wide-reaching cultural, social, and economic impacts and legacies only came into public discussion towards the latter end of the twentieth century.^[11] The Bicentenary of the Abolition Act in Britain in 2007 (and the Government and Heritage Lottery Fund money that came with it) was a significant milestone in prompting new exhibitions and research projects at a number of heritage sites, including country houses. Prior to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trust had planned to instigate a year of public programming around legacies of slavery in 2020, with 2022 focusing on wider legacies of empire.^[12] The report therefore brought together much research that had been ongoing for a number of years. It showed that around one third of properties within the care of the Trust were connected in some way to histories of colonialism. This included 29 properties which were connected to histories of slavery through slave-ownership and compensation claims, as evidenced within the Legacies of British Slave Ownership database.^[13] Others had links through the administration of plantations, trading of slave-grown commodities, and histories of abolition. However, research into connections to historic slavery formed a smaller part of the broader remit of the report which covered a range of colonial histories and contexts, with a greater proportion of the report outlining connections to the East India Company and the Royal Navy, for example. The fact that the media and political discourse honed in on histories of slavery in their response, is telling.

Across more than 170 newspaper articles written after the publication of the report, patterns emerged which reflect the longer history of Britain’s public memory of slavery and contemporary tensions around race, class, and a fractured national identity in a post-Brexit context.^[14] There were concerted campaigns from leading right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, whose journalists launched very personal attacks at the report’s editors including a sustained focus on Corinne Fowler, Professor of English at the University of Leicester. Fowler had also led a heritage project with the National Trust called Colonial Countryside which engaged school children, heritage professionals, and academics in exploring the colonial links to country houses and estates through writing and history.^[15] As Fowler has noted, while the report itself covered quite a broad range of connections between properties and connections to different elements of empire and colonialism, through short-handed naming and “click-bait”-style headlines, the press tended to refer to it more restrictedly as the “slavery report.”^[16] This, as Fowler also argues, reflects an emotional reaction, revealing the extent to which slavery remains a sensitive and unresolved touchstone in the British national psyche. It also speaks to the ways in which histories of the British empire have tended to be framed through a “positive” versus “negative” binary lens in public discourse, as seen in the “balance sheet” approach to empire history (that “good” elements of the British Empire – often articulated as the imposition of transport infrastructures, science, and indeed abolition efforts can outweigh the “bad” elements such as slavery and warfare).^[17] Such simplistic and reductive framing is ahistorical and uncontextualized, and hinders more meaningful, complex, and indeed useful understandings of the past and its ongoing legacies in the present. This “good versus bad” binary can also be seen through the ways that the media framed the report, not as a document outlining current research and knowledge, but more sordidly as a “list of shame.”^[18] Newspapers deployed language intent on eliciting an emotional reaction from readers; it was a “naughty list” of “colonial sins,” a “hit-list,” and a “witch-hunt,” phrases and tone which the report itself never used.^[19] Despite the introduction to the report stating that “[n]o one alive today is responsible for the iniquities of the period in question and consequently,” much media and political posturing in the months following its publication sought ways to evoke feelings of guilt and shame, and to suggest this was the Trust’s intention.^[20] Letters to the editor in response to such articles suggested that the Trust was conducting a “blame-game” and had “no business…to sit in judgement.”^[21] One letter suggested that if any of the editors of the report had ancestors who “before 1865, smoked, had sugar in their tea, wore cotton or drank rum” that they too should publicly declare their family’s involvement in slavery.^[22] In some ways this letter does make a good historical point. The impact of slavery on Britain was more widespread than wealth generated for the owners of country houses. Commodities such as those listed were produced, grown and made more greatly accessible through enslaved labor. However, the author then falls back onto more established narratives engineered by Britain’s culture of abolition by stating that the British Empire “may not have been perfect, but it was greatly responsible for reducing slavery.”^[23]

Much of the continued critical attention to the report and subsequent actions were fueled by a combined effort of a group of Conservative members of parliament (MPs) called the Common Sense Group and an internal pressure group called Restore Trust. The 59 MPs which comprised the Common Sense Group advocated against what they termed a “woke agenda,” including the “cultural Marxist dogma” of the National Trust, and called on the government to revoke the organization’s charitable status following publication of the report in 2020.^[24] Set up by a small group of disgruntled National Trust members in April 2021, Restore Trust initially formed in response to the publication of the report which they suggested had a “political agenda” and sought ways to portray “country houses and the families associated with them in a negative light.”^[25] Beginning with a website and regular communications through like-minded journalists at the Daily Telegraph, the group soon began moves towards more profound organizational changes, including attempts to oust the Trust’s Chairman, Tim Parker, at the Annual General Meeting in 2021.^[26] Parker did step down, however he did so before the AGM and the Trust stated that he had already led a longer than usual term to maintain stability through the COVID-19 pandemic.^[27] Restore Trust continued to try to gain influence over decision-making at the National Trust through fielding preferred candidates for the governing council at several AGMs, however none were appointed.

3 Plants, Gardens and Green Heritage Spaces

The Trust’s 2020 report largely concerned buildings and estates as a whole, with considerations of parklands, gardens, plants, and botanical connections discussed as an extension of this larger picture.^[28] Knowledge and understanding of where plants, gardens, and green heritage might feature in (public) histories of slavery and empire are a clear area for development. Much of the well-worn discourse and reactionary debate which was hostile towards public acknowledgement of connections between Trust sites and histories of slavery focused on the built environment as a key component of what Laurajane Smith has argued is an “authorised heritage discourse” (AHD). The AHD constructs understandings of “heritage” as largely tangible, old, and elite, at least in Western/European contexts.^[29] That fewer (public) connections have been made so far between plants and green spaces and histories of slavery in the British heritage context, provides potential new avenues forward through novel methods of exploration and understanding.

However, some reactions to emerging work in this area point to how contentious this could be. The Royal Botanical Gardens (Kew Gardens) were criticized for “growing woke” following announcements that they would be pursuing routes to decolonize collections in order to “acknowledge and address any exploitative or racist legacies, and develop new narratives around them” as outlined in their Manifesto for Change, published in 2021.^[30] Conservative Party MP, Sir John Hayes (a member of the Common Sense Group) called the move “preposterous posturing by people who are so out of touch with the sentiment of patriotic Britain.”^[31] Following this backlash, Kew removed the language of decolonization, opting instead to “re-examine” collections, aligning themselves more closely with the government’s preferred “retain and explain” approach.^[32] The right-wing think tank Policy Exchange called on the Environment Secretary to launch a review into Kew for an apparent breach of the National Heritage Act of 1983, and its legal obligations, by engaging in “non-scientific, and indeed politically charged, activities.”^[33] Plants, this suggests, are science – histories of empire, politics. Botanist and author James Wong, who trained at Kew, was also targeted for speaking publicly about a lack of diversity in the horticultural industry and experiences of racism in the world of gardening.^[34] Wong argued that the backlash he received was itself reflective of the problem, that, “gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA. It’s so integral that when you point out its existence, people assume you are against gardening, not racism.”^[35] There has also been critical attention on academics for making connections between rural areas, gardens, and histories of colonialism. Following the publication of Corinne Fowler’s book, Green Unpleasant Land in 2021 (which emerged from the Colonial Countryside project), the Daily Mail suggested the book proposed that “by pruning our roses or digging the vegetable patches, we are all somehow perpetuating the evils of racism.”^[36] While the book claimed nothing of the sort, the response in the letters-to-the-editor pages expressed anger over this perceived denigration of history. More recently, Restore Trust took issue with the connections made between histories of plants and gardens, and colonial contexts within an updated guidebook to the eighteenth-century mansion and estate Croome Court. This new guide included additional context around the 6th Earl of Coventry’s use of “plant-hunters” to bring back seeds from expeditions, including those made by Captain James Cook to the South Pacific Ocean. In response to the guidebook’s point that “‘Plant hunting’ in the colonial era sometimes had a detrimental effect on the people and ecologies of the places where it occurred,” Restore Trust responded that, “whatever damage may have been caused by the search for ornamental plants, it is as nothing compared to the habitat destruction occasioned by the establishment of plantations for economic plants such as rubber and oil palm trees – not just in the British Empire, but in the Dutch, French and Spanish empires also.”^[37] Whether Restore Trust would want curators to introduce new interpretation spelling out whether expeditions for “ornamental” plant species were better or worse than other environmental exploitations, is unclear. The establishment of many monocultural landscapes, especially those created and maintained by former owners of country houses through the plantation economy in the Caribbean and elsewhere, did indeed have devastating environmental and health impacts. This is an integral dimension to understanding the environmental history of colonialism and its legacies around the world, including at British country houses which were developed through the wealth such plantations created, and influenced in other ways including botanically, in design, artworks, artefacts and materials. There is work to do therefore, not just in researching under-explored historical connections between plants and people in relation to slavery and empire, and indeed how these feature in heritage sites in Britain and beyond, but also in appropriate and meaningful approaches to their public interpretation and communication.

4 Conclusion: ‘Politics’ and Plant Public History

Public histories of slavery and empire became a key touchpoint in highly politicized culture wars in Britain under Boris Johnson’s populist Conservative government. However, much of the loudest criticism came from quite a small subset of members (under the helm of Restore Trust), some more right-wing dimensions of the political establishment, and the right-wing media. Many people were supportive of the Trust’s direction, including bodies like the Royal Historical Society and public historians such as David Olusoga. There are also signs that the vitriol of the 2020–2022 culture wars has abated under the Labour government, elected in 2024.^[38] Further, rather than a diminished membership leaving in droves over the report, National Trust membership increased by 50,000 between 2020 and 2021.^[39] As of January 2025, membership stood at a healthy 5.38 million people.^[40]

For heritage organizations like the National Trust, where many more people will visit the grounds and gardens of a site than go inside a house, developing gardens as productive spaces of public history has huge potential. There is a great deal of public interest that such developments can align with. This includes interest in environmental issues, increases in visiting green spaces, and the rise of gardening since the pandemic.^[41] Alongside the work at Kew, there have been recent movements to acknowledge the colonial contexts of botanical histories and garden institutions publicly and academically, as well as interesting developments in the emerging field of Plant Humanities.^[42] Establishing a new field of Plant Public History could therefore tap into alternative ways of talking about marginalized histories and challenging topics with global reach, garnering interest with varied audiences across different demographics. With the National Trust’s new strategy focused on ending “unequal access to nature, beauty and history,” Plant Public History offers a unique way forward in telling fuller and more complex stories of plants and people.^[43]

Views expressed in this article are those of the author.