English Heritage Membership

There is a very good chance you will save money by joining. I'd look at the website and see how many of the attractions covered by the membership you would be visiting anyway, add up their individual entry fees and compare against membership. Chances are if you're doing 2-3 or more, membership will pay for itself.

I wouldn't rely on them to alert you to events, as they may selectively promote a small number. There is probably a monthly email newsletter, but the website gives event details anyway, some events are member only. Using the website, you can search for events in a given area, on a specific date.

Appreciate your input!
BONS

Beware that many historic properties are owned by the National Trust or are in private ownership. You should try and figure out what properties you are likely to visit belong to EH & whether it would pay you to take out membership.

I would certainly look at your options. we are presently spending 3 weeks driving around the UK. we joined our national trust ( it has reciprocal arrangements with UK national trust) thus far we have found that some places here
are English Heritage, some are National trust.
from a purely 'saving money' answer, we certainly wont save any money as we aren't looking around at touring the appropriate sites and hence saving on entry fees.
if we were here for months and sought out more places then we would probably save money.

There are a few places which are covered by both National Trust and English Heritage membership as each has a 'hand' in it, or one is managing it on behalf of the other. Possibly the most frequently mentioned is Stonehenge, although in this case it extends only to actual National Trust members, and not other organisations with an affiliation, even National Trust for Scotland.

I'm about to set off on a nearly-three week trip to the UK and was wondering the same thing. I was about to order Stonehenge tickets and was struggling with the question. I went through the English Heritage website and looked at every place they had listed. For each place that was on/near our itinerary, I checked the price. Many of the smaller places were actually free. For those that weren't, I totaled up the entry costs for every place we MIGHT be interested in going - this included a handful of castles (or ruins) that we did not necessarily intend to stop at, but were at least located near our planned itinerary. Even counting up all these "opportunistic" sites, the total cost for the English Heritage membership came to almost exactly what the cost for each of these places would be. So, at least in my case, we would have had to stop at every possible site covered by the membership pass in order to break even or save a few pounds. I generally like to have an "unlimited use pass" for attractions, but in this case the numbers just didn't add up for us. If it would let us skip a long line or enjoy some other benefit (beyond helping to support preservation, which is of course a worthy cause in and of itself), then I would have gone for it. But in this case, I decided to skip the membership and we will just pay as we go. YMMV, but I think you need to run the numbers to see if it makes economic sense for you or not.

We used an English Heritage overseas visitors pass on our last trip to England and it saved us quite a bit of money. It really depends on what you do. We actually visited many more sites than we had planned. They have 9 day and 16 day passes.

Great input....THANKS!

English Heritage tends to be the much older sites like Stonehenge and ruined castles. National Trust is about preserving "newer'" properties such as author's homes and stately mansions. The one you join should be chosen on the kinds of places you want to visit.

just some extra info about National trust. We have been using our membership to visit some castle/gardens etc. the staff have been exceptionally helpful and knowledgable. having a membership did mean that, because we got in for 'free' we felt that we didn't have to stay long ( to make it feel like we got value, if you know what I mean) so we managed to fit more in the day and we visited one place that we wouldn't have as the cost was difficult to justify, but as we got in for 'free' it was good.

One place we visited was Powis castle in Welshpool. WOW !!, we both said we enjoyed it much more than Versailles and Linderhof etc etc ( we did spend some time there, also looking around the gardens.)

My husband and I purchased a Royal Oak membership which gave us access to all of the National Trust properties and free parking at many, many rural areas, particularly in the Lake District.

We found the properties to be marvelous!!! In addition to simply the properties, the volunteers were so knowledgable, friendly, open, and fun! We learned so much about the properties and the history of the families. We learned a great deal from the park rangers as well.

We ended up visiting many of these properties, and were extremely happy with our membership.

Enjoy!
Virginia

As mentioned above, English Heritage tends to be the older state properties.

One thing to remember as well is unlike between the National Trust (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and the National Trust for Scotland, the reciprocity between English Heritage and its equivalents (CADW in Wales and Historic Scotland) is not immediate. Ordinarily first year memberships in one only get half price rather than free entrances in the others so if you are crossing any of the borders this would need to be built in.

I just wanted to add that the reciprocity agreements with English Heritage may be different for Overseas Visitor Passes than they are for regular membership. I don't remember the details but they are explained on the English Heritage site. We have used both types of passes. If you are using the pass for more than 16 days, regular membership might work better.

Eef good point. Some of the passes will be just that, passes and have no validity beyond English Heritage or even for some properties. Always worth looking at the exceptions.