I must thank Harry Mount for alerting me to the National Trust’s forthcoming partnership with the Japanese cartoon leviathon Pokémon, although he provided no such early warning system for their partnership with the British cartoon character Shaun the Sheep in 2025. I was thrilled to see that one of my local Trust properties is taking part. In the 30 years since Pokémon’s launch in Japan, it has become a $90 billion media franchise, stretching across TV shows, films, video games, trading cards and toys, transcending barriers of language, nationality, age, class and sex. According to YouGov, one in five Brits has played Pokémon Go, rising to more than half of Gen Z. Being popular with people who aren’t like you doesn’t automatically make it ‘catastrophic dumbing down’.
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Brendan O’Neill
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If you have children, Pokémon is almost unavoidable. And sometimes we need to meet children where they are, to show them where we want them to go. I don’t entirely disagree that curation of the National Trust’s houses in recent years has been uneven. As the biographer of a pioneering female politician who was a self-described Victorian imperialist and anti-feminist, I know the importance of taking the past on its own terms. But distaste for the Trust’s offering for adults may blind us to its creative attempts to get families through the gates to enjoy time outdoors together in a way which is entirely in keeping with the history of these houses.
