‘I’m not afraid of anybody now’: the woman who revealed links between National Trust houses and slavery – and was vilified

‘Dialogue and openness are always the best antidotes to culture war’: Prof Corinne Fowler in Grasmere, along the route of the 'East Indian Company Walk’. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Standing outside Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the drizzle, Prof Corinne Fowler seems a very unlikely looking fire starter. But that is exactly how anonymously apoplectic defenders of crown and country have tended to view her. Fowler was, in 2020, the co-author of a report into the colonial history of properties belonging to the National Trust. After which, as they say in the tabloids, all hell broke loose.

At the moment her report was published, culture war arguments about the country’s past were already primed. The statue of the slave-trading philanthropist Edward Colston had lately been toppled into Bristol harbour; Black Lives Matter marches had brought an end to lockdown; footballers were taking the knee. For some on the right, Fowler’s report became (yet another) lightning rod for their anger.