Buildings, streets and statues across Britain commemorate men who may have been philanthropists, but also owned and traded slaves. Now a number of cities are starting to face up to their histories

Edward Colston is, says Katie Finnegan-Clarke, “almost like a cult figure” in Bristol. There is a Colston Street, and Colston Tower is on Colston Avenue. There is even a Colston bun, which you might eat on Colston’s Day. Finnegan-Clarke, one of the activists in the Countering Colston campaign, went to Colston’s Girls’ school, where “there are statues everywhere, and we had three ceremonies every year to celebrate his life.” Colston was a 17th-century philanthropist who gave great sums of money to the city – money he had made from slavery. This week it was announced that there would be one less Bristol institution bearing his name. The concert venue Colston Hall – which has been a target for activists for decades – will reopen in 2020, after its refurbishment, with a new name.

“We knew it was the right thing for the organisation,” says Louise Mitchell, the chief executive of the trust that runs the venue. “It’s very important to us as a progressive forward-looking arts organisation that we include everybody, and people felt uncomfortable entering the building because of the perception that it had in some way profited from the slave trade.”

That wasn’t technically true, she says – it was built nearly 150 years after Colston’s death, and was unimaginatively named after its address, Colston Street, but its name still stands as a memorial to the man. It has seen performances from giants such as Ella Fitzgerald, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and David Bowie, but the Bristol band Massive Attack have famously boycotted the venue because of its name.

“There are very strong views on both sides; we always knew there would be a backlash,” she says. “Some people are cheering, some are booing, but what I had to do was take the right decision for the organisation. We can’t be inclusive if people won’t come into the building.”

A poll for the Bristol Post had found that people opposed renaming the venue two to one, and there have been accusations of airbrushing history. “I think the organisations that hold him up in that honorary position are the ones who are airbrushing history,” says Finnegan-Clarke. “He was one of the most powerful slave traders in Britain: 85,000 Africans were kidnapped and enslaved while he was running the Royal Africa Company. I think by honouring him, that’s airbrushing history.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A flyer for a Beatles concert at Colston Hall in Bristol in March 1963. Photograph: Alamy

The renaming of Colston Hall “is probably the first significant change in the UK,” says Nicholas Draper, director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership at UCL. “There will be others. It’s a wider process that’s unfolding in the US, and is probably true in France to a degree. Anywhere there is the significant imprint of slavery, and maybe the wider imprint of colonialism, then this will happen more and more. We’ve had, in the end, a public culture that has been relatively unreflective of the post-colonial moment, and that’s no longer a tenable position.”

There are other campaigns in Bristol, a city built on wealth accrued through the slave trade. Countering Colston has its sights set on the large bronze statue in the city centre, which it wants moved to a museum. At the University of Bristol, there is a campaign to rename the Wills Memorial Building. Henry Overton Wills was from the tobacco-giant family, and Wills “symbolises the great wealth acquired through the enslavement of individuals of African descent,” says Asher Websdale, one of three students who started a petition. “It’s not a name that the student body can unanimously state they are proud to stand as a centrepiece in the university. Our history lacks the commemoration of women and people of colour; a name change could allow us to take a step toward rectifying this injustice.”

In February, a city councillor in Glasgow proposed – temporarily, but symbolically – renaming Buchanan and Dunlop Street, named in honour of tobacco magnates. Nina Baker, a Green party councillor, acknowledges it would take a huge effort to rename them permanently, but, she says, “I thought we could start the ball rolling by raising awareness. I’d seen something about Spain doing this, renaming streets that had been named after fascist-era people after women freedom-fighters.”

The same was proposed in Liverpool in 2006, about Tarleton Street, Manesty’s Lane and Clarence Street, but the idea was dropped – partly because it would have meant renaming Penny Lane, which was named to commemorate slave ship-owner James Penny, but is now more famous as the title of a Beatles song.

The US is ahead of Britain on this. This week, Confederate monuments were removed from streets in New Orleans. “The removal of these statues sends a clear and unequivocal message to the people of New Orleans and the nation: New Orleans celebrates our diversity, inclusion and tolerance,” says mayor, Mitch Landrieu. “Relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, blame or retaliation. This is not a naive quest to solve all our problems at once. This is about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile – and most importantly – choose a better future. We can remember these divisive chapters in our history in a museum or other facility where they can be put in context – and that’s where these statues belong.” Forrest Park in Memphis – originally named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan – was renamed in 2013; the KKK protested.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Penny Lane in Liverpool, which was named after slave ship owner James Penny, but is now more often associated with the Beatles song. Photograph: Mikael Buck/Rex/Shutterstock

There are particularly strong campaigns around universities. In February, following a long wrangle, Yale announced it would change the name of Calhoun College (named after John Calhoun, a US vice-president and supporter of slavery,) but it will not remove symbols of him around the campus. In 2015, there were student-led protests at Princeton to remove former president and segregationist Woodrow Wilson’s name from the university (the university refused). Last year, Harvard Law School dropped its seal, which was based on the family crest of a slave-owner, Isaac Royall. The Rhodes Must Fall movement started in 2015 at the University of Cape Town, to remove a statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes, and spread to other universities, including Oxford, which has a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College. Earlier this year, there was discussion about removing eugenicist Francis Galton’s name from a lecture theatre and laboratory at UCL.

Not everyone thinks renaming is the answer – and renaming, anyway, is only a small part of ongoing discussions about how countries should deal with their involvement in slavery. “The danger is we end up erasing the past rather than problematising it,” says John Oldfield, director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at Hull University. “An alternative strategy might be to use these names as a way of drawing attention to the complexities. You should use those names to discuss the past, because that informs how we understand the present.”

He points to the way Brown University in the US has acknowledged its past. Brown is considered the leader on this issue: president Ruth Simmons commissioned a report on the university’s history, and as a result introduced a number of measures including establishing the Centre for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and an endowment fund to support disadvantaged children.

In Bristol, many say that it is not possible to forget the city’s connection to the brutal trade in human beings. “It cannot be airbrushed. There are so many other things in Bristol that remind us about the slaving past,” says Olivette Otele, a historian at Bath Spa university. The issue is that a name given to a place or building is “a recognition of a contribution, it’s a celebration”.

What is happening in Bristol, she says, “is important because it means Bristolians themselves are shaping their own present, and how they want to remember the past and write the future. It’s their decision, and I’m excited about the whole thing.”

Things get more complicated when one considers where such moves should stop. Draper likes to think of it in terms of a hierarchy, or concentric circles, where slave-traders would be the “bullseye”, with owners of enslaved people closely following, and people who benefited from the trade, the bankers who financed it, and people who had connections, however remote, in the outer rings. “We’d need to have some sense of where the boundaries are, or could be. But I think ‘slave-trader’ is something very difficult to push away.”

Does it matter if most people passing a statue or a place name have no idea who the commemorated person is? “Isn’t that exactly the point?” he says. “That we’re celebrating people, and have forgotten what they did?”

The writer Amit Chaudhuri was invited to address Rhodes Must Fall activists at Oxford in 2015. In a piece he wrote for the Guardian, he remembered how he hadn’t noticed the Rhodes sculpture when his wife was at Oriel College in the early 1990s, and recalled once looking in on a talk given by Enoch Powell, not with horror, but a feeling that the once-divisive politician was now irrelevant, a relic; it seemed to him as though we were heading towards genuine equality and diversity. But two decades on, he argues that something else entirely is going on, and points to “how narrow the culture has become in Britain, in a very insidious way”.

Bristol: the city that lauds the slave trader | David Olusoga Read more

Over the last 20 years, and particularly since 9/11, he says, there has been a turn against multiculturalism – some people have become seen as a threat to “our” way of life, resulting in a kind of closing down. It was there in Theresa May’s vans targeting “illegal” migrants, he says, in fears over immigration and the nostalgia for past British “glories” that stoked Brexit, and in the government’s pitiful response to the refugee crisis.

The other thing that has happened, he argues, is a widening economic gulf between the rich and those who have suffered most from the economic crash. “The affluent of the past, who became affluent out of exploitation – statues of those people begin to kind of chafe.”

The statues and names, and the history they stand for, “seem to be in collusion with the closing down that’s happening, and the [class] who are protecting themselves. I think that’s part of why it has become more urgent today. I don’t know what the solution is, in terms of removing statues or renaming places, but at the same time, I can understand why it’s happening.”