[Ride On]

The latest national trust magazine cover story is of a member of staff who cycled to all 624 national trust places in the UK.

It was then extremely disappointing to find recomendations for only 7 sites near national cycling networks rather than a breakdown of the cycle friendliness of each site. He also discovered what a lot of us already know that it is difficult to work out where bikes were allowed at National Trust sites and that only 37% had bike racks!

If you read road.cc Huw Davies, share the data and keep working for improvements please.

Topic

[mattw]

I agree this is an important

I agree this is an important one (National Trust Life Member here), but I don’t know how to address it.

AFAICS things get priority in the NT when there are noisy internal lobbies of members, which we see for example in an obsession about fox hunting (my view on this is permissive, but it’s a side issue in this post).

My local main NT property is Hardwick Hall; I have not explored what access there is like, but a picture of their cowboy film cycle racks are below.

They are easy to lock to but not secure, and completely unusable for many disabled cyclists due to the gravel path and the stepovers; they should simply be normal Sheffield stands.

NT should be facilitating access by foot or wheel, but it is an extremely commercial operation. Another issue is full size cattle grids with no cycle bypass on estate roads, which at Hardwick Hall you have to drive on for a couple of miles.

The other item I have no knowledge of is to what extent the National Trust puts anti-wheelchair or anti-cycling barriers on Public Rights of Way across their land, or their own internal or permissive pathways.

I guess an obvious one is 2 way cycling on estate roads, especially as they all seem to have 15-20mph limits.

I guess that what might work here is a joint approach from cycling organisations, and a 10-20% discount for members of such who charitable-relief-for-tax their donation at the entrance, if that combo is legal. They do various discounts eg for Blue Light cards.

[David9694]

I’m on about bus access here,

I’m on about bus access here, but the NT privileging car access at the expense of everyone else is the main theme. 

https://road.cc/content/forum/national-trust-access-bus-or-train-302927

[Author]

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