The National Trust’s abuse of language

‘Remember to bring your childrens bikes with you so you can all enjoy the estate,’ the National Trust’s website says, inviting visitors to its parkland site at Crom beside the shores of Upper Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. If, like me, you think omitting the apostrophe in ‘children’s’ is a bad look for an organisation that claims to raise ‘the standard of presentation and interpretation’ at the places it looks after, then steel yourself; it gets much worse.

You see, the National Trust may ‘look after nature, beauty and history for everyone to enjoy’ but it doesn’t seem to care much about the English language. Its invitation to ‘Take a peak at the view of Sidmouth’, for example, might be more alluring if the reader wasn’t thinking: ‘Er… shouldn’t that be “peek”?’ An organisation with an educational mission and commitment to ‘teach and inspire’ really shouldn’t be making basic grammatical mistakes and spelling errors.