In 2017 the National Trust marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and its partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England with a programme of events entitled ‘Prejudice and Pride’, which drew attention to the stories of people in Trust’s properties– mostly, but not exclusively, their creators and owners – whose lives did not fit conventional expectations of heterosexual family life, such as William Bankes at Kingston Lacy, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey at Plas Newydd and Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson at Sissinghurst. 

One result of the project was the decision to commission a book on the subject. In this seminar, which reports on work in progress, its author, Michael Hall, discusses some of the issues raised by such an approach to the National Trust. ‘Prejudice and Pride’ was based on a curatorial emphasis on the ‘stories’ that the Trust’s properties can tell. Might it be possible to go further and produce a queer history of the National Trust as an institution, drawing on the substantial academic literature examining the relationship between queer identities and such topics as class, domesticity, architecture, interior decoration and collecting from the eighteenth century to the present day? Do current approaches in queer history and contemporary understanding of LGBTQI identities offer new ways of analysing the way that the National Trust relates not only to ideas of family and inheritance but also to broader concepts of heritage?

Michael Hall is the current Editor of The Burlington Magazine. A former architectural editor of Country Life, he was editor of Apollo magazine from 2004 to 2010. Michael is an expert on Victorian architecture, whose books have included Waddesdon Manor (third edition, 2012) and the lavishly produced George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America (2014) which won the SAHGB’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion in 2014. Since 2000 he has chaired the Victorian Society's activities committee. A trustee of The William Morris Society, he is also a member of Westminster Cathedral's Art and Architecture Committee.