'Left-leaning' National Trust head admits: 'We have alienated traditional members', after spate of controversies

The outgoing head of the National Trust has admitted that the organisation has alienated "traditional visitors" in the wake of rows over Easter egg hunts, gay pride badges and flapjacks. 

Dame Helen Ghosh, who takes over as Master of Balliol College, Oxford University, next April, said that while Trust membership was healthy "sometimes some of our perhaps more traditional visitors have felt that they are not being catered for as they once felt that they were.”

She told Radio 4's The World This Weekend: “Sometimes I see signs that our places, or things going on, that perhaps tread too far in one direction than another.

“It is sometimes the case that we appeal too much to one audience, and not enough to another."

Dame Helen, who succeeded previous director general Dame Fiona Reynolds in 2012, continued: “I haven’t got a specific example in mind. I think what I’m describing is that in order to be open-armed to welcome the widest possible group of visitors to our places, sometimes some of our perhaps more traditional visitors have felt that they are not being catered for as they once felt that they were.”

The Trust has endured a torrid summer, during which it has faced criticism for requiring volunteers to wear gay pride badges, the public ‘outing’ of Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, former owner of Felbrigg Hall near Cromer, and a change in the recipe for it’s celebrated flapjacks.

Earlier in the year, the Trust was accused of "airbrushing faith", after the word "Easter" was dropped from the annual egg hunt it runs with Cadbury.

Speaking on Radio 4, Sir Roy Strong, a former director of both London’s Victoria & Albert museum and the National Portrait Gallery, was damning in his assessment of the Trust.

He blamed successive “left-leaning” director generals, and suggested it may be time for the organisation - which attracts more than £500 million in annual funding - to be “broken up”.

Sir Roy, 82, said: “If you go to a National Trust house or property, you’re being almost told what to think, and how we ought to react.

“They’re obsessed with children, play areas, fun things at Easter and Christmas, and so on. 

“The signs are that the National Trust is being turned into a branch of the leisure industry.

“Within the last 20 years it’s really begun to alienate its own public. They’ve had two director generals, both competent in their own ways, and a balance has gone. Both were left-leaning”.

“My own view [is that] it’s too large, and therefore it’s kind of alienating a lot of its members. I think there is a big discrepancy between the historic houses and gardens which certainly the present DG is possibly embarrassed about, and landscape and coastline, and it may well benefit from splitting.

“So much of what they do sounds like the Blair government in exile. It’s ticking the boxes against the disabled, the aged, LGBT, the ethnic communities and the rest of it, and something gets lost along the way.”

The National Trust attracts 20 million visitors per year to its 775 miles of coastline, 248,000 hectares of land and more than 500 historic houses, castle, monuments, gardens and nature reserves