Bristol will get a permanent monument to honour the victims of the transatlantic slave trade - and some kind of museum or ‘story-house’ to tell the story of Bristol’s involvement in the horrific chapter in history, as well as those stories of how enslaved people fought back to free themselves.
But the deputy mayor of Bristol said such a museum or venue should not be created ‘on the cheap’ and, in a sideswipe at plans to convert a derelict building in the Old City into a slavery and abolition museum and education centre, said the council would not do something like ‘opportunistically converting a derelict building’.
In the first official statement on an issue that has been bubbling in Bristol for decades, deputy mayor Cllr Asher Craig said council chiefs and members of the Legacy Steering Group she leads had been working quietly behind the scenes on where, when and how Bristol creates both a memorial and a museum that addresses the city’s slave-trading history.
Read next: Does Bristol need a slavery memorial or museum and what would it look like?
Cllr Craig said the Legacy Steering Group had been set up in 2019 to discuss Bristol’s long-standing lack of recognition publicly of its slave-trading past and ‘ensure a suitable recognition of the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Afrikans (TTEA)’. The city’s vast wealth and much of its architecture, suburbs, churches and public buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries come from the wealth generated from the transatlantic slave trade, and the industries that made Bristol rich used raw materials from forced slave labour on plantations owned by Bristol’s millionaire merchants.
But as of now, the only public acknowledgement of this a small plaque on the side of the M-Shed museum, a small section inside the museum and Pero’s Bridge across St Augustine’s Reach, which is named after one of the few enslaved African people who made the third leg of the ‘triangular trade’ journey, as a slave servant to the rich Pinney family.
Cllr Craig said the 200th anniversary of the Slavery Abolition Act in the 1830s was ten years away, and this represented the ‘perfect moment for the LSG to redouble efforts to design, create and deliver this process’ to create something more permanent and significant in Bristol. “This reflection and our experience of the last few years have also brought a growing ambition for this process to lead to an outcome which is permanent, of truly significant scale and ambition,” Cllr Craig said.
“As has been pointed out by community leaders for at least a decade, Bristol deserves a national and international monument to honour the victims of the slave trade. This is not a quick campaign, but an enormous undertaking – and one which we are actively seeking major funding towards. We hope to establish an ongoing way to articulate the stories of those people as well as their forebears and descendants, correcting the many and widespread misunderstandings which have caused and continue to cause extreme pain and trauma for so many people in Bristol, and across the United Kingdom.
“Today, ahead of the 200th anniversary of the Slavery Abolition Act in a decade’s time, represents the perfect moment for the LSG to redouble efforts to design, create, and deliver this process.," she added.
Last month, Bristol Live revealed that a coalition of campaign groups, called the Abolition Shed Collective, had gone ahead and submitted a speculative planning application to create a slavery and abolition museum and education centre by converting the old Seamen’s Mission Hall and church in Prince Street.
The building, which is owned by a Yorkshire brewery, has been an empty eyesore for decades, but after lobbying from council chief Nicola Beech, who wrote to the owners - Yorkshire brewery Samuel Smith’s -demanding action, the firm has finally agreed to put the building up for sale.
The campaign group have previously drawn up plans to create their vision inside the O&M Shed building next to Redcliffe Bridge on Welsh Back, but the city council instead sold it to restaurant development company and then spent £1.4 million of taxpayers’ money to buy, refurbish and then move a houseboat moored in front of it, just so it could be moved to allow the restaurant plans to proceed.
Without mentioning the Abolition Shed Collective plan by name, Cllr Craig appeared to reference it in her deputy mayor’s blog. “It’s clear that the city will need to provide land to custom-build a bespoke, fitting museum or story-house and our administration continues to explore this. We cannot afford to do something so important on the cheap, opportunistically converting derelict buildings which did not exist before 1833/34, let alone have meaningful links to the history we are seeking to remember and commemorate,” she added.
Previously, the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, has told Bristol Live he’s cautious about the idea of having any kind of ‘slavery museum’. And in previous years, the council has talked about converting an existing city council-run museum - the Georgian House - into a museum or visitors’ centre that addresses Bristol’s slave trading past.
The Georgian House is the former home of the Pinney family - who owned Pero and made their fortune from the slave trade and sugar plantations - and is currently open to visitors to show what a wealthy Bristol merchant’s home would have been like in the 18th century.
Cllr Craig referenced a ‘story-house’ as well as a museum in her blog, but didn’t mention The Georgian House by name. She did say that members of the Legacy Steering Group had travelled to other European cities to see how they had addressed their history on this issue.
“This is part of a considered process. Members of the LSG travelled to Hanover, Bordeaux, and Berlin, to understand how others have worked though issues of memorialisation, contested histories, identity, and belonging,” she said. “We draw inspiration for the approaches of the Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust and the Museum of the Jewish People and took the time to discuss these themes with the Mayor of Bordeaux during his recent visit to Bristol.
Read more:
- Competition in Misery - the forced slave labours from Bristol and the West Country
- Slavery museum or three new restaurants - the two very different fates planned for unused harbourside warehouse
“We will also, more immediately, be working to approve a final action plan to undertake the first stage of commissioning talented artists to design a permanent site of commemoration. It is vital that we remember the brilliance and resilience of the people who suffered under the TTEA, and its modern legacies, rather than only the violence that was done to them.
“This site will delve into the brutal reality of that history but also the stories of resistance, uprising, and survival after the abolitions of enslavement and the institution of slavery; the resilience and resurgence of communities in the Caribbean and across the world since 1900; the ongoing legacies of suppression and injustice which confronted the Windrush generation and subsequent generations of migrants to the UK; and the present-day resistance, agency, and creativity of British Black communities today and in the future,” she added.
There is no news yet on where such a site might be in Bristol. The Abolition Shed Collective group had suggested their plan for the Seamen’s Mission could also include another space nearby which is also owned and abandoned by Samuel Smith’s Brewery. The plot on Narrow Quay next to the Arnolfini has been empty for decades and the suggestion is to create some kind of monument or garden of remembrance for the victims of the slave trade.
Read more:
- The Deputy Mayor's blog in full
- Mayor cautious over idea of Bristol slavery museum or memorial
- How the city failed to remove Edward Colston's statue for years
- 'We Are Bristol' History Commission has 'extreme lack of Bristolians' involved
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