{"id":6639,"date":"2022-03-22T11:58:30","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T18:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/?p=6639"},"modified":"2022-04-14T15:47:17","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T22:47:17","slug":"liverpool-black-history-walking-tour-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/liverpool-black-history-walking-tour-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Liverpool Black History Walking Tour (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Liverpool<\/p>\n

From St. John’s Gardens to Liverpool Town Hall<\/h2>\n

Between the end of the seventeenth century and middle of the nineteenth, sail ships from Liverpool forcibly transported more than 1.35 million shackled Africans to slavery in the Americas, practically three times\u2019 the population of today\u2019s city: ghastly arithmetic relayed to tourgoers by Laurence Westgaph,\u00a0Historian in Residence for National Museums Liverpool. The wealth accrued by those engaged directly (trading in human flesh) and indirectly (trading in slave-produced goods) remains visible \u2013 unconsciously commemorated, even \u2013 in the urban environment, not least in respect of contemporary street names, over 150 of which were so named because a slave trader\/merchant owned the respective land.<\/p>\n

With the toppling of slave owner Edward Colston\u2019s statue (Bristol, UK) specifically, and the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd (Minneapolis, US)\u00a0more generally, many Liverpudlians as well as those from further afield sought to (re)familiarise themselves with the region\u2019s slavery links to critically assess the merits of HM Government\u2019s \u201cretain and explain\u201d policy on street names and problematic statuary. Yet the demand for places on Laurence\u2019s free walking tours far outstripped supply, supply that was abruptly cut off with the adoption of COVID-19 rule-of-six measures. (Laurence leads eight tours, each of which can be booked via\u00a0Eventbrite<\/a>, while his Facebook group \u2013 \u2018Liverpool and Slavery<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 keeps followers updated on how tour donations are helping to fund Liverpool\u2019s\u00a0Enslaved Memorial Project.)<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

Holding the belief that the need for social distance shouldn\u2019t preclude curious souls from getting up close with unsanitised history, this local historian devised a self-guided \u201cdark tourism\u201d trail (linking sites from a number of tours) for locals\/visitors to gain a better understanding of how Liverpool capitalised on the murderous exploitation of enslaved Africans and thereby help redress the imbalance of what many of my generation (b.1983) and older were taught at school: more the role of gatekeeper (abolition) and less the poacher (enslaver). (\u201cDark tourism\u201d, according to Philip Stone, author of 111 Dark Places in England That You Shouldn\u2019t Miss<\/em> (2021), is \u2018the act of travelling to sites of death, disaster, or the seemingly macabre\u2019.)<\/p>\n

The connection between charity and brutality is something to ponder over while standing\/sitting in St. John\u2019s Gardens, a manicured public space across the road from the entrances to the Central Library and World Museum (the construction of which was partly financed through the slave-accrued wealth of merchant-benefactor William Brown) from where you can admire the west fa\u00e7ade of the visually arresting St. George\u2019s Hall in the distance, but where statues of two men associated with slavery loom large in the foreground: Arthur Bower Forwood, a blockade-runner for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and William Gladstone (Images 2, 3 & 4), the iconic status of whom is increasingly contested as the former prime minister is deemed no longer immune to revision.<\/p>\n

What renders these memorials to individuals who got rich off the whipped backs of Africans especially galling is the fact they\u2019re built\u00a0on top<\/em>\u00a0of their bodies since \u2013 being the former site of St. John\u2019s Church. It\u2019s the location where many of the town\u2019s enslaved domestics were interred between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; most were reinterred elsewhere before landscaping commenced at the start of the twentieth, yet some nonetheless consider the resting place of the outcast dead to be a \u201cdark\u201d site \u2013 the exponents of which undoubtedly increased after listening to Laurence\u2019s storytelling. \u2018Many of these forgotten individuals have lain in unmarked graves for over 200 years\u2019, he points out on a walking tour, the donated proceeds of which will fund the above-referenced memorial to those who lived, died and were buried in the city. \u2018Many were not only interred without a marker but even without their names\u2019, Laurence poignantly adds, before providing an example of an entry in the burial register from 23 September 1778: \u201cA Black boy belonging to Mr. [James] Penny\u201d, a notorious slave trader after whom it was erroneously believed Penny Lane was named. (Research conducted amid Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 found no \u2018historical evidence\u2019 between slaver and street, however, which is a Beatles\u2019 landmark given it inspired the band\u2019s namesake hit record.)<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Address<\/em>: St. John\u2019s Lane, St. George\u2019s Place, William Brown Street, Liverpool, L1 1JJ<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>
Statue of William Gladstone (1809-1898)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>
A reinterpretation board erected at the statue\u2019s base \u2013 since removed \u2013 by Slate Project, an organisation endeavouring to \u2018use the city[\u2019s built environment] as a tool for acknowledging and learning from the past\u2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>Having made your way back to the entrance of the World Museum, continue (west) in the direction previously walking\/wheeling, following the pavement around to the right before crossing the traffic lights on Byrom Street. Ahead of you is Dale Street, albeit slightly off to the left, just beyond Fontenoy Street on your right and a car park adjacent to the entrance of the Mersey (Queensway) Tunnel on your left. Continue advancing (west) along this busy throughfare \u2013 one of the seven original streets comprising \u201cLiuerpul\u201d situated within today\u2019s commercial district \u2013 for approximately 650 metres until you reach the Town Hall, located at the top of Water Street, a total of 800 metres from William Brown Street. Grade I-listed, this neoclassical gem is one of the finest surviving Georgian buildings in Britain notwithstanding its modification, extension and reconstruction (Image 5). The south and east fronts survive, the latter of which is decorated with friezes of an African in feathered headdress and an elephant. Hiding in plain sight, albeit above the windows, these exotic emblems of mercantile trade identify the source of a proportion of Liverpool\u2019s wealth through civic glorification (Image 6), illustrating its shameful role as a port from where floating jails departed during what Laurence calls an \u2018unacknowledged Holocaust\u2019 or \u201cMaafa\u201d, Kiswahili for \u201cgreat tragedy\u201d. (The Holocaust is without comparison, meaning serious writers ought to tread carefully when contemplating an analogy, though pedants are reminded of the gargantuan, trans-oceanic demographic assault \u2013 involving the displacement and premature death of twelve-and-a-half million enslaved persons \u2013 that the Transatlantic Slave Trade embodied.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"William
Gladstone reinterpreted by British Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong using a pan-African flag (July \u201921) for Statues Redressed<\/em>, a television documentary that aimed to \u2018challenge, celebrate and debate the role of monuments in modern society\u2019, according to an information board at the foot of Thomas Brock\u2019s 1904 statue. Collaborator on the redressing of Queen Victoria, Laurence posits: \u2018If we don\u2019t tear them down, fantastic art installations like this [\u2026] use the statue to tell a different narrative\u2019. Radical cultural historian Alan Rice, Co-Director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, labels such artwork \u2018guerrilla memorialisation\u2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>Address<\/em>: Liverpool Town Hall, High Street, Liverpool, L2 3SW.<\/p>\n

Financed by the town\u2019s slave-trading elites, such as the Blundell, Cunliffe, Earle and Heywood families, it was built in 1754 by a firm owned by Joseph Brooks, uncle to namesake Joseph Brooks Jnr. and co-owner of a ship the Brooks<\/em> (or Brookes<\/em>), which was immortalised in the 1787\/8 cross-sectional sketch of (c.480) slaves tightly packed below decks in the pestilential hold; Brooks Alley, named after the landowning Brooks family, is one of the twenty streets identified by Liverpool City Council in 2020 as needing a reinterpretation notice. In 1781, the same year of its construction, a massacre occurred aboard the Zong<\/em>, another infamous slaver co-owned by a Liverpudlian. William Gregson (after which Gregson Street is named, but which doesn\u2019t feature in the aforementioned top 20) headed a syndicate of merchants, one investor being his son John, who would \u2013 following in his father\u2019s footsteps \u2013 be elected Mayor of Liverpool in 1784, only months after the court case(s, the second being the insurer\u2019s appeal against the initial judgement in favour of the Gregsons) provided the starkest illumination that captives became insurable cargo akin to livestock.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"Although the tragic details are well known (aided in part by J.M.W Turner\u2019s 1840 canvas, The Slave Ship<\/em>, what art historian Simon Schama labels the \u2018greatest British painting of the nineteenth century\u2019) they merit repetition, not only because the Zong <\/em>case is a microcosm of the inhumanity of the trade in humans, but because these Black lives mattered: 133 African men, women and children were jettisoned due to a putative water shortage (arising from navigational incompetence) into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean Sea by the captain who \u2013 as a loyal servant of the voyage\u2019s shareholders \u2013 sought to transfer potential \u201closses\u201d (ill captives were less profitable at slave auctions) from the owners to the underwriter. The loss of 132 souls (100 additional enslaved Africans perished during the Middle Passage, according to the Slave Trade Database, leaving only 208 out of 440 to disembark) became a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre<\/em> for abolitionists, while the two-page court report (Gregson vs. Gilbert<\/em>) inspired a contemporary poet, namely M. NourbeSe Philip and her book-length poem (Zong!<\/em>, 2008) which, through group-readings, helps ensure that their story remains alive 240 years on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no exaggeration to say that the mercantile community dominated the town\u2019s governance, and concomitantly influenced its burgeoning development as an urban centre, since each of its 20 Mayors between 1787 and 1807 were involved in the slave trade, either as a ship owner or an investor, as were all the borough\u2019s MPs until William Roscoe in 1806. This leads Laurence to claim that the Town Hall is the \u2018single greatest architectural monument to Liverpool\u2019s involvement\u2019. It\u2019s arguably this building that actor George Frederick Cooke alluded to as being one comprised of bricks \u2018cemented [together] by the blood of a negro\u2019 when hissed on stage at Williamson Square\u2019s old Theatre Royal in 1806, a fact not lost on protestors in 1999 who took umbrage with the Town Hall being the venue from where a formal apology was declared after a debate into the port\u2019s prominent role in the trafficking of Africans.<\/p>\n

\"Liverpool
Town Hall \u2013 formerly Liverpool Exchange \u2013 is the office of the Mayor of Liverpool. The incumbent is Joanne Anderson, the first Black woman to be directly elected Mayor in the UK.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Liverpool
Two examples of \u201cexotica\u201d (propagating stereotypes of the peoples and places imperial Britons encountered and visited) on the entablature between capitals of pilasters.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sixty-seven Mayors were involved (directly as investors) in 1,886 slave voyages between 1703-1807 according to local historian David Hearn, author of The Slave Streets of Liverpool<\/em> (2020) and the forthcoming Liverpool\u2019s Legacy of Slavery<\/em>, the latter of which features a damning figure (arrived at simplistically, granted, but not without a relative degree of confidence through mathematical equation): 450,000. This is the number of Africans that Mayors \u2013 referred to as \u2018kidnapers (sic) who infested the highest municipal offices\u2019 by Trinidadian scholar-statesman Eric Williams in his magnum opus Capitalism and Slavery<\/em> (1944), recently republished by Penguin Press \u2013 collectively were responsible for uprooting and transporting into a life of forced servitude and premature death (approximately 12% died even more prematurely during the Middle Passage across four centuries) through cutting sugar cane and picking cotton on plantations in the Americas. The enslaved had, to quote philosopher Thomas Hobbes,<\/em> a \u2018nasty, brutish, and [all too frequently] short\u2019 existence.<\/p>\n

\n

This is the first of a three-part article.<\/p>\n

You can read part two at: https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/liverpool-black-history-walking-tour-part-2-of-3\/<\/a><\/p>\n

About the author:
\n<\/em>A frequent \u2018Letter of the Month\u2019 winner in UK travel newspapers\/magazines, Lee P. Ruddin\u2019s entry in Senior Travel Expert\u2019s 2018 (Heritage) Writing Competition was shortlisted as Highly Commended by judges; his entry in I Must Be Off\u2019s 2020 contest was longlisted. His articles feature in Robert Fear\u2019s\u00a0Travel Stories and Highlights: 2019 Edition<\/i>, on the websites of Hotel Metropole Hanoi and Bath\u2019s Royal Crescent Hotel, as well as at\u00a0TravelMag<\/a>. In addition to tips appearing on\u00a0theguardian.com<\/a>, he has reviewed travel guides for LoveReading and NetGalley and, to date, has travelled in and via 45 countries on four continents. Born in Birkenhead on the Wirral in North-West England, he currently resides in Birmingham, where he works in the security industry.<\/p>\n

All photos by Lee P. Ruddin<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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From St. John’s Gardens to Liverpool Town Hall Between the end of the seventeenth century and middle of the nineteenth, sail ships from Liverpool forcibly transported more than 1.35 million shackled Africans to slavery in the Americas, practically three times\u2019 the population of today\u2019s city: ghastly arithmetic relayed to tourgoers by Laurence Westgaph,\u00a0Historian in Residence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1109,1106],"class_list":{"0":"post-6639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-u-k-travel","7":"tag-black-history","8":"tag-liverpool-tours","9":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/travelthruhistory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}