Cities have always been about apportioning and memorialising power; about writing force into space. Britain’s colonial and imperial past is inscribed into the bricks and mortar of every city and town in the country. Mostly this hidden text of power relations and wealth acquisition lies dormant in the half-forgotten significance of street names, in the knotty iconography of grand facades, in the barely read inscriptions on memorials and sculptures, in the nomenclature of grand public buildings. Forming the backdrop of lived lives, these omnipresent clues are rarely fully decoded. The most monumental of sculptures has a habit of fading away to near invisibility if it is sufficiently familiar.
At times, though, such associations are activated and become urgent. So it has been in the case of the long-running affair of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the 17th century from the enslavement of thousands of Africans.
In some ways Colston’s statue, so dramatically toppled in Bristol on Sunday, was an outrider. His name and legacy are inescapable in the city, with schools, streets and a concert hall named for him. Campaigners, in the teeth of resistance from those who argued that removing his name would be an erasure of history, have been attempting for years to get the sculpture removed – or at least relabelled so that his role in the slave trade could be better understood.
Back in 2017, even the church that had held annual commemorations in Colston’s honour for 300 years refused to do so; Colston Hall, the city’s best-known music venue, plans to announce a new name this autumn.
In the end, the force of history overturned his sculpture as much as the hands of protestors.
Even Historic England, the body in charge of safeguarding listed monuments such as the Colston statue, and hardly a known force for radicalism, has said it recognises “that the statue was a symbol of injustice and a source of great pain for many people”, that the statue’s future must be decided locally, and that it will not insist on its reinstatement.
Now other campaigns around the UK are gathering new force in the wake of the recent anti-racism protests. Looming over Edinburgh’s New Town, at the eastern end of the elegant George Street, stands a 46-metre column. Atop it stands, in the centre of St Andrew Square, in a heroic pose reminiscent of that of a Roman emperor, the figure of Henry Dundas, the first Viscount Melville.
Dundas was home secretary, war secretary and the last figure to be impeached in Britain, in 1806, for the misappropriation of public funds. His name and that of other family members are sprinkled liberally through the Scottish capital – the grand, poker-straight Dundas Street runs north towards the Firth of Forth from the centre of George Street; the city has its Melville Street, Crescent, Terrace, Place and Drive.
Sir Geoff Palmer, a professor emeritus of Heriot-Watt University, has been running a years-long campaign for a new plaque on the base of the sculpture to explain Melville’s role in slavery, since, as he put it in an article for the National, “he delayed the abolition of the slave trade for 15 years (1792-1807), which caused the enslavement of about 630,000 Africans; and as war secretary lost about 40,000 British troops in Haiti fighting a pro-slavery war.”
In recent days, the name George Floyd has been written by protesters on the base of the sculpture, and a petition has been launched demanding the removal of the statue altogether. The petition also calls for the renaming of the Dundas and Melville streets in honour of Joseph Knight, an African-born man who was enslaved in Jamaica in the late 18th-century, then brought to Scotland by his master. He managed to free himself after a series of court cases in which he successfully argued that slavery did not exist in Scots law.
In Glasgow, protesters have renamed a number of central-city streets whose official nomenclature celebrates grandees and notables enriched by slavery – especially by slave-worked tobacco plantations in Virginia and Maryland.
Buchanan Street, the city’s main shopping thoroughfare, is named for the 18th-century plantation owner Andrew Buchanan. At the weekend it was given a new sign calling it George Floyd Street.
Cochrane Street – after Andrew Cochrane, another plantation owner and the Lord Provost of Glasgow – was given a sign naming it Sheku Bayoh Street, in commemoration of a black man who died in Fife in custody in 2015, after being restrained by police.
Recent events have also given fresh impetus to Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which began in 2016. A protest is planned on Tuesday in front of Oriel College’s sculpture of the imperialist, politician and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes. A sign taped to a door on the city’s High Street, near the statue, bore the words “Rhodes you’re next” – a reference to the toppling of the Colston sculpture.
The meanings locked into Britain’s urban fabric are being increasingly examined, decoded – and found wanting.
• This article was amended on 6 July 2020 to clarify that not only the name of Henry Dundas, but also of other members of his family, feature across Edinburgh.
