The statue of Edward Colston should stay in a museum and be on public display to help teach people about Bristol's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
That is the verdict of the people of Bristol who took part in a survey that accompanied the statue on display at the M-Shed last year.
Almost 14,000 people - more than half from the City of Bristol itself - took part in the survey, and three-quarters said they wanted to see the statue in a museum. Of those from Bristol, that was percentage was even higher - four in five Bristolians.
READ MORE: How Colston falling changed Bristol but is the 'ultimate distraction'
Around one in six people from Bristol said they did not want the statue in a museum in the city - and three-quarters of them wanted it returned to the plinth - 12 per cent of the overall total of people from Bristol.
The detailed findings of the survey were unveiled this afternoon, Thursday, by the chair of the 'We Are Bristol' History Commission, Prof Tim Cole from the University of Bristol, alongside Prof Shawn Sobers, from UWE and Dr Joanna Burch-Brown, from Bristol University who is an expert in the transatlantic slave trade and Bristol's history.
The survey, which was filled in by the thousands who visited the M-Shed in the second half of 2021 to see the statue of the Bristol-born slave-trader and by people online from around the country and the world.
And because the survey went into detail about where people were from and who they were, the survey results even showed where in Bristol those who filled it out were from.
The report said that those organising the survey went out into the areas where fewer people had filled it in, to do 'extra outreach' in neighbourhoods with lower initial response rates.
There were 16 events at schools around the city too, and 'live' events in Fishponds, St Pauls, Lawrence Weston, Oldbury Court and Lawrence Hill.
Prof Cole said: “I wasn’t really sure what the findings would be, how divided the city was.
"But what we found was there is very much a shared voice - there is a very strong sense of city speaking with one voice.
“What we see here is engagement from right across the city, and the poorer and richest have really said the same thing.”
What did the survey reveal?
A total of 55 per cent of the 13,984 people who filled in the survey were from Bristol, and the report focuses on the results just from Bristol, as well as the 45 per cent of respondents who do not live in the city itself.
The survey almost exactly matched a Bristol Live survey, conducted in the week after the statue was toppled in June 2021, and filled in by almost as many people, which showed that a majority of people supported the removal of the statue and did not want it returned.
The History Commission survey revealed that the vast majority of Bristolians - 80 per cent - want the statue in a museum and only 12 per cent wanted it restored.
There was also a majority in favour of putting a second plaque on the plinth to reflect the events of June 2020. Almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of people want that, but fewer than a third did not agree. That feeling is even stronger among people in Bristol - where support for a second plaque rose to 71 per cent.
The report said opinion was mixed on what to do with the plinth itself - with 58 per cent of people from Bristol supporting using it for temporary sculptures, but few people wanted the empty plinth removed entirely.
Overall, almost two-thirds of people from Bristol said they felt either 'very positive' or 'positive' about the statue being pulled down. In fact, half of every person from Bristol who filled in the survey said they felt 'very positive' about it.
Just over a third of people said they felt negative about it, mainly because of the way it happened.
But there was a marked difference in those feelings of positivity and negativity by age - the older a respondent was, the more likely they were to feel negative about it - and from the over 65s upwards that negative feeling was a majority.
There was, however, little difference in the overall attitudes of positive or negative feelings to the statue coming down between different ethnic groups, or whether someone lived in a wealthy or less wealthy area of Bristol.
Recommendations
The We Are Bristol History Commission have made six recommendations.
The first is that the statue is formally entered into the city's museum collection, the second is that it's preserved in its current state.
The third is that it is exhibited with context about its own history and the history of the enslavement of people of African descent.
The fourth recommendation is that the plinth remains and a new plaque is installed to explain what happened.
The commission even recommends a suggested wording for this second plaque: "On 13 November 1895, a statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721) was unveiled here celebrating him as a city benefactor. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the celebration of Colston was increasingly challenged given his prominent role in the enslavement of African people. On 7 June 2020, the statue was pulled down during Black Lives Matter protests and rolled into the harbour. Following consultation with the city in 2021, the statue entered the collections of Bristol City Council's museums."
The fifth recommendation is that the Conservation Area Character Appraisal - the document setting out why The Centre of Bristol is a conservation area - is updated to reflect the fact the statue isn't there any more.
And the final recommendation is that 'the city think creatively' about what to do with the empty plinth and the area around it.
"The survey has shown that there is much that we as a city agree on," the report concluded.
"Most of us think that the best for the statue is in a museum in the city. Most of us think the plinth should remain, with a new plaque, and should be a space for ongoing conversation. There are also areas where our views differ. We should welcome this. Thinking differently is not a problem, but something to be celebrated," it added.
The 'We Are Bristol' History Commission met occasionally behind closed doors in the first year after the statue was toppled, and close to the first anniversary of that act, it was put back on show - complete with the damage caused to it when it was pulled from its plinth, and with the paint that had previously been sprayed onto it before it was toppled - in an exhibition at the M-Shed.
The statue, and Bristol's relationship with the transatlantic slave trade and its history has long been controversial. After establishing what campaigners later called 'the Cult of Colston' in late Victorian times, Bristol's wealthy merchants and businessmen talked up Colston's philanthropy and adults and children celebrated 'Colston Day' annually for decades.
But the first attempts to counter that narrative and find out more about the man who ran the Royal Africa Company at a time when its ships transported at least 80,000 enslaved people to plantations in the Caribbean and North America, on which around 19,000 people died, began as long ago as 1920 - and many in Bristol have been challenging the official line on Colston for a hundred years.
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