National trust membership is it a class thing

[candaby653]

Ok so I have never thought about national trust membership being a class thing. I thought of it as a normal thing lots of families have.

However I heard someone in a cafe having a rant about someone they knew, "they have every middle class status symbol right down to the national trust sticker on the Audi"

Is this how people see national trust!

Of course it is. Visiting their properties full stop is a MC activity, let alone membership.

Kenilworth Castle is a random example, entry is really quite expensive, only MC / rich kids are ever going to visit. Quite sad. I would like to see a bigger proportion of taxes be spent on historic / cultural sites / events.

I just borrowed them from the library 😂

It might be a bit of a chicken and egg situation?

If you don't have a membership then it is quite expensive to get in as a one off, and it doesn't seem as good value in terms of entertainment etc as e.g. a swimming pool or a local arcade or a soft play centre or something. So if you have a limited weekend entertainment budget, then it's probably not something that would be particularly attractive on a lower budget. For example we mostly do things which are free at weekends, and there are plenty of woodlands and parks which are free to walk around.

It probably does work out better value if you get the membership that works out cheaper per visit but then would you even realise that if you'd not been there in the first place? Maybe not.

(Which is a long way of saying yes, it has a middle class association to me).

Yep middle class to me, for a start assume you need a car. Whilst many working class people of course own cars , don't see NT really being on their radar

Life Member here. Gifted as 18 birthday present. At the time it included “and guest”. So I’ve never paid membership or for a ticket. I go to NT when I’m skint.

I'd definitely consider the national trust as predominantly middle class. But that's a large portion of the population as a pp said.

Yes it is, people in benefits don't get discounted membership

According to some MNers, just about everything is a ‘class issue’!

We had friends (certainly MC) who shuddered at the mere thought of joining the NT - a sure sign that you were halfway to boring, decrepit old age.
They’d have been possibly early 50s at the time, same as us, and were appalled to realise that we were members.

I felt the same about Saga - when I hit 50 my DM told me (evidently thinking I’d be delighted) that I was now eligible to go on Saga holidays.
She couldn’t understand why I recoiled in horror!

Oh dear. My liking for wandering around the occasional castle when we're on holiday seems to have let me down.

We're not NT anyway, we're EH. So there.

Here are some of the things that the MC are more likely to have than the WC and how that means the MC are more likely to be NT members

• funds to get a subscription
• cars to drive out to the places
• free weekends off work to have family days out
• grown up in a MC household which spent lots of free time going on family days out to ticketed venues

I grew up working class but love history and passionate about preserving our heritage so I'm a NT member.

You do need disposable income to pay the annual fee and not many can have that these days. Generalising here but it's many working class that are still low incomes. Hence the class argument.

National Trust do give away free tickets in the autumn. Def worth looking at. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/escape-into-autumn

I had NT membership when my daughter was younger and don’t drive! We waited for the discount each year but it was never more than £7 a month.

We are the same - I might have it if I lived near a NT property, but I’m not spending £120 purely to park at Box Hill once a year.

I don’t know if that makes me working class or just stingy.

Snore.

The rabble use it for dog walks
Rabble here. I only have it so I can park the not-Audi (decrepit Japanese vehicle) in the car park every week or so to walk the dogs in the rolling grounds.

I'll use it to visit places on holiday, but that alone wouldn't justify the membership.

NT membership is something like £15 a month; if you aren't members then a day out at an NT place can set you back a good £50+ for a family of 4; this is an awful lot of money when you're so skint that you can't afford to even eat despite working all hours night and day in a physically demanding job. You simply don't have the funds or the energy to go to those places on your rare days off. Instead, if you go anywhere, you end up going to free places like the local park. You let your kids play out instead with their friends on the street because at least they're busy, outside, and not under your feet.

Also: having an interest in wandering around stately homes/castles and gardens. Y’know, cultural things.

That kind of outing would have been completely alien to me growing up. My dad would have considered it boring and arty-farty. Day trips for us were the local seaside town for ice cream, candy floss and 2p machines. Or, very rarely, the zoo. But generally speaking we didn’t do that many things as a family. Looking back, my mum has said it’s because dad couldn’t be bothered 😂

My dd and I got memberships and we not MC by any means.

It's a mix in my friends. A day at NT with younger children can be as cheap as a couple of hours in the larger soft play places and nobody would say working class people can't do soft play.

I hate the idea that working class people don't do National Trust, galleries, arts, museums and similar activities. It tends to come from people who must imagine that working class people have nothing better to do with their days than stay at home with the telly on and never leave their neighbourhood and/or haven't got a penny to spend on nice days out and/or use their disposable income on fags, mags and alcohol.

Being working class doesn't mean you have to live in a cultural vacuum, and I think it is really quite insulting that people seem to think that working class people aren't interested in anything remotely resembling culture of any kind.

I think it also depends where you live. There are 4 different NT places within 20 mins drive so we use our membership all the time. Pretty much none of my friends who live in London are members as there are hardly any NT places there.

I'm a broke single parent and we have a national
Trust membership as it works out cheaper for us really to visit different places, and free parking at local beaches etc.

expensive hence middle class

Absolutely agree.

Of course loads of working class people are interested in history, just like middle class people. We are very working class, and my mom and cousin are members of a local history society and the membership is very working class (as much as one fan generalise) - I think a lot of things like local history societies have working class membership or at least quite a mixed membership.

NT requires quite a bit of money tho, doesn't it? The gift shop and the cafe are always really dear. (i know you don't HAVE to go to these - but if you are taking the kids, say, it is nice to be able to). Whereas there are other ways to enjoy and learn about history (local groups, documentaries, websites etc) that are much cheaper or even free.

One of my ex husbands was quite aspirant middle class and when we had our daughter he insisted we join NT because I think he kind of thought it was the done thing? Also he did quite like stately homes in fairness.

I found it a bit boring to be honest - it was nice to see each place maybe once, but I didn't want to keep going back to them especially ....
I find something like the Black Country Living Museum or Blists Hill or somewhere like that a lot more interesting. But I know that's not really relevant to the thread!)