Uncomfortable Histories

Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Richard White offers some background to his new book on the uncomfortable legacy of the slave trade in Bath and Bristol, and his walking arts approach

Dr Richard White is a former Senior Lecturer in Media Practice at Bath Spa University and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow. For the past 10 years he has been hosting walks creatively exploring hidden, obscured and often uncomfortable histories, legacies of slave-ownership and colonialism. In July the book he contributed to and co-edited, Breaking the Dead Silence: Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes was published by Liverpool University Press and is available as a free PDF download.

Part One: Breaking the Dead Silence 

Memoryscapes are personal and shared; we each have a patchwork of memories of feelings, smells, sounds, humans and non-humans, places and plants that make a map of the world we inhabit. Memoryscapes can also be corporate and institutional, manipulated by those in authority to generate particular narratives and to silence and disable others. My creative work walking and asking questions attends to both the personal and the institutional, generating new questions and new memories.  

The shadow of the toppling statue of Edward Colston hangs over our book. The idea was conceived after a Zoom panel discussion following the June 2020 events in Bristol. Following an open call, nineteen diverse authors contributed: activists, academics, historians and heritage professionals. Each chapter explores, directly or indirectly, a response, commentary or experience in the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd and the renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide.  

The title references Jane Austen’s description of ‘the dead silence’, a closed down conversation, a silence that is not allowed to become an argument, in which there is no fuel for contestation or any further sound of agreement or disagreement. The events of 2020 appeared to shatter the prevailing dead silence on racism and the legacies of chattel slavery and colonialism; a new richer, more honest, more open heritage narrative appeared to be emerging even in Bath. Chapters in the book discuss some of those initiatives in the changing memoryscape. My own chapter, however, ‘On The Resilience of the Dead Silence’ became less optimistic. I recount my own experience in Bath, from delivering a commissioned cycle of walks in a well-known site in Bath to being cancelled.

Acknowledgement and apology for chattel slavery and the other atrocities of colonialism are the first essential steps towards psychological, cultural and financial repair.  

As dust settled on the drying-out statue lying recumbent in the dark of a Bristol museum warehouse, I received a phone call withdrawing the commission for a walk at a gala event. I was informed that the content of the walk was ‘inappropriate for such a celebratory event’. On reflection I observed how, once the lever of funding is removed, Bath’s white parochialism returns and the pervasive silence rises up elegantly and discretely screening off the uncomfortable. Exhibitions disappear and become foot notes on a website, video links dropped, information sheets locked away.  

Despite the frisson that the toppling of the Colston statue sent through the heritage institutions of Bath, acknowledgement or apology of any kind has yet to find a permanent voice, least of all from the custodians of Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage Site status. 

Acknowledgement and apology for chattel slavery and the other atrocities of colonialism are the first essential steps towards psychological, cultural and financial repair. My former Bath Spa University colleague Professor Olivette Otele wrote about ‘reluctant’ sites of memory: places whose custodians deny or obscure connections with a particular uncomfortable or contested past, prevent mourning or acts of remembrance.  

Reluctant Sites of Memory are mirrors into our past and present. They are oblique but powerful reflections of our abilities to forget, remember and create knowledge despite social, cultural and economic impediments.  (2018)  

Other academics have written about how these haunted and wounded places teem with unheard voices and stories. Over these past ten years as an artist-researcher, walking and asking questions, I have learned about colonial exploitation, forced migration and looting, all hidden in plain sight in Bristol and Bath. From Bath’s UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and the old port of Bristol to the coastal cities of the UK and beyond, public sites of memory have yet to fully acknowledge the atrocities committed in the creation of the wealth they manifest.  

Walking beside the river we made visceral, watery connections: water drove the mills that made the brass items, these items were transported via water, as were the enslaved Africans.

In 2014 for the opening of the Commons building at Newton Park, I presented an installation using media from a walk between the old brassmill at Saltford and Clevedon Pools, Bath. The brassmills along the River Avon were, in many respects, the mint for the trade in West African peoples’ lives, producing, amongst other items, brass manillas, wearable wealth, the currency of the slave trade. The wealth generated through the labour of those enslaved is embodied in Bath where slaveowners came to play, network and bathe.  

Walking beside the river we made visceral, watery connections: water drove the mills that made the brass items, these items were transported via water, as were the enslaved Africans, water irrigated the sugar and it was water, hot and cold, that their enslavers enjoyed in Bath. Millions of Africans died in the long years of the transatlantic trade; those forced onto the ships and became ill or resisted or both were thrown overboard into the Atlantic Ocean – flesh, bones and memory in the sea. Whether it is the rain that falls cool over Bath or that which seeps down to hot rocks to return as hot springs, that rain comes off the Atlantic. As poet, Derek Walcott wrote, The Sea is History (2008).