Put down the jam scone and stop scrutinising that Chippendale sideboard. The National Trust will be directing visitors to examine more revolutionary concerns this year with a programme of events commemorating protests, marches and demands for social change.

The conservation charity is best known for its careful stewardship of hundreds of historic homes across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But in an effort to be “relevant” and capture new audiences, it will focus this year on the history of protest at its sites, in a programme inspired by the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre.

“We recognise that many people want more than a cream tea,” the trust’s director of culture and engagement, John Orna-Ornstein, said at the programme launch. “They want to feel connected to the places they visit.”

That means a public art programme led by the Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller in which contemporary artists engage with sites where people have “gathered together to seek dramatic social change”.

At the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ tree in Dorset, the artist Bob and Roberta Smith will examine how ordinary people achieve change, inspired by the six labourers who were transported to Australia for forming a union to protest against their poor working conditions.

Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker is devising a series of events to commemorate the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, which led to open public access to the countryside.

Two of the trust’s properties have direct links to the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which cavalry charged a large crowd of protesters in Manchester who had gathered to demand reform of political representation.

Quarry Bank cotton mill, whose then owner witnessed the Peterloo massacre. Photograph: John Millar/National Trust/PA

The founder of Quarry Bank cotton mill, Samuel Greg, witnessed the massacre and opposed its subsequent cover-up. By contrast, Dunham Massey, a Georgian house in Cheshire, was owned at the time by the head of the militia that charged into the crowd, killing 18 and injuring hundreds.

Their connections will be explored by the artist couple Grace Surman and Gary Winters, while the film and photography collective Amber is working with local people in the former pit community of Easington, County Durham, where the National Trust looks after five miles of coastline that were once black with the residue of the local mining industry, now long vanished.

Orna-Ornstein denied that the trust was trying to make a political point. He said the programme, called People’s Landscapes, emerged from “a conscious decision to find the stories that resonate most strongly from our places and to explore them, and to tell them in interesting ways with contemporary artists”.

He added: “Some of our places have borne witness to human suffering; other sites have been places of profound joy; many have been both. If our places are to remain relevant now into the future, we need to be able to tell these complex stories.”

Dunham Massey in Cheshire, which has a direct link to the Peterloo massacre. Photograph: Matthew Antrobus/National Trust/PA

He said visitors – of which the trust attracts more than 26 million each year – would see “more that is locally relevant but nationally resonant. Programming that speaks to our 5.3 million members, but also to those who may currently feel disconnected from our cultural heritage.”

He pointed to a project at Croome, in Worcestershire, where a grand Georgian house designed by Capability Brown was later sold to the Roman Catholic diocese of Birmingham, becoming a boys’ school. A number of former pupils of the school have made allegations to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. From March the house will host an oral history project involving former students and other children in the care system, examining the meaning of “home”.

Projects such as this were “becoming more and more important to the trust programming, ensuring we are relevant to the lives of modern people,” said Orna-Ornstein. “They are also critical if we are to become relevant to new audiences, because we cannot simply expect people to come to us, sometimes we should be willing to go to them.”

Other highlights for 2019 include a new 17-metre viewing tower at Sutton Hoo, giving visitors a view of the Anglo-Saxon burial complex; the recreation of a historic garden at Sissinghurst in Kent; and an exhibition of 17th-century Dutch paintings from the trust’s collections at Petworth House in West Sussex.