How are Walking Tours and ‘Grassroots’ Memorialisation Changing Public Perceptions of Slavery?
By Imogen Clement-Jones, Third Year History
As we as a society reckon with our imperial history and the difficult legacies associated with it, discussions regarding our collective memory of slavery have started to gain traction. Using the example of Liverpool, The Bristorian delves into the power walking tours and 'grassroots' memorialisation have in altering and informing our perceptions of slavery for the better.
Wander through the city centre in Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon, and you might notice the ‘Liverpool and Slavery’ walking tour, created by prominent Liverpudlian Laurence Westgaph. Rather than visiting The Cavern Club or Liver Buildings, punters start their tour at Falkner square.
Here, the square’s information board documents Edward Falkner’s past as a soldier, while ignoring the vital, yet uncomfortable, historical context: that Falkner had purchased the land through the wealth he had gained from trading in enslaved people. Onwards they walk, stopping at buildings built by slave traders: by men who became members of parliament, mayors, philanthropists, leaders in industry and business.
The tour ends at Our Lady and St Nicholas Church, revealing the graves of enslaved people. It becomes clear, as Westgaph states: ‘When you scratch the surface of Liverpool, slavery comes seeping out.’ This piece will explore Westgaph’s walking tour, and how ‘grassroots’ memorialisation of slavery has begun to overturn the dominant narrative in Liverpool.
The history of the remembrance of transatlantic enslavement is a growing field and the importance of ‘local’ contingencies within the field is starting to be emphasised. For instance, Pierre Nora’s lieu de memoire(sites of memory) shows how focal points in the transatlantic slave trade carry specific meanings and memories for particular groups.
Though studies have mostly focused on official commemorations, such as museums and round number anniversaries, Alan Rice’s theory of ‘guerrilla memorialisation’ – describing how political activists have engaged in commemoration outside of the mainstream – provides a useful framework in understanding grassroots action like the ‘Liverpool and Slavery’ walking tour.
Although Liverpool was the largest slave port in Europe, its ships being responsible for transporting around 1.4 million enslaved African people, such history has predominantly been side-lined. The mainstream narrative instead foregrounded a Scouse enterprising spirit through ‘beating’ Bristol and celebrating maritime success, whilst undermining links to slavery through only brief mentions in guidebooks.
Liverpool began to officially address this past at the turn of the millennium, with the first permanent exhibit, the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, opening in the Maritime Museum in 1994; a Slavery Remembrance Day from 1999; and the International Slavery Museum opening in 2007. Though these developments can be attributed to the global heritage boom of the 1990s, alongside political discourses of multiculturalism, grassroots action was crucial, particularly from the Black community.
The black population, who have lived in Liverpool since at least the eighteenth century, have long been instrumental in ‘guerrilla memorialisation’ of transatlantic slavery, the legacy of which has shaped their own history. In Liverpool their presence can be traced back to slaves, free servants, the children of plantation owners and slavers, and to nineteenth century trade with West Africa.
Mark Christian argues that Black people have consistently struggled in a city shaped by slavery: experiencing ‘race riots’ taking place in 1919 and 1948, as well urban decline and ‘ghettoization’. Resistance has been consistent, with Black organisations present from the 1930s, becoming more political during the 1960s civil rights movement, and the 1980s Toxteth ‘riots’ proving a turning point in race-relations.
Memorialisation by these organisations has centred around education, with the Charles Wootton college set up in 1974 and a magazine, Black Linx, in 1984, using history to better understand contemporary racism. This disrupted official narratives through educating within and outside the community. The development of the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery was altered by a boycott of the museum, following which there was a ‘humanising’ drive and numerous Black consultants and curators were employed.
The ‘Liverpool and Slavery’ walking tours, which have been led since 1997, became a key feature of activist memorialisation following the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, where global protests against police brutality and structural racism were incited by the killing of a black man - George Floyd - by police in Minneapolis.
This brought increased attendance, with over seven thousand members on Facebook and six new tours added. The attendance on a Saturday in April 2021 was made up of mostly locals (largely due to Coronavirus restrictions), varying in age and ethnicity.
Like ‘Scott’, whose walking tours feature in Jessica Moody’s work, Westgaph’s motivations stemmed from an upbringing where he learned about slavery through books and informal networks. Global memorialisation was important too: visits to West African slave fortresses represented a turning point for him, as did a dissatisfaction with the narratives presented in the 2007 abolition commemorations and the International Slavery Museum.
Rebecca Casbeard’s analysis of the Bristol Slave Trail provides a point of comparison, as Westgaph similarly uses the embodied and physically demanding two hour walk to draw connections between slavery and the physical environment – the lieux de memoire – with walking space between stops allowing for personal contemplation.
As is typical of slavery ‘heritage’ tours, by ‘following the money’ Westgaph links street signs to slavers who invested in philanthropic and industrial endeavours. However, he more so engages with the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants; one stop is at a Georgian church where Alexander Mosley was baptised in 1857, drawing attention to family division and dislocated experiences during enslavement, as the baptism record noted, his parents are ‘not known, he, having been sold as a slave in his early years in Virginia.’
This creates a more human and emotional connection than the ‘follow the money’ memorialisation. It is hoped that the £20,000 raised by the walking tour might be able to alter the city’s memorialisation of enslavement, through a memorial to the enslaved people who lived in Liverpool, as well as a schools’ prize for essays on the city’s Black history.
Westgaph’s walking tour, built on a long history of protest and activism by the Black community in Liverpool, arguably alters how the public - both visitors to Liverpool and Scousers themselves - understand the city’s relationship to slavery, both historic and ongoing.
Through the embodied process of walking through the city, the past and present are explicitly linked, and it becomes clear that its connections to slavery are not just an element of the city’s past, but fundamental to it. This is particularly relevant in the present political environment, fraught with debates of identity after the Brexit and Trump votes, as well as following the Black Lives Matter movement, as Britain begins to unpick its history and re-evaluate Britishness itself.
More so perhaps than in the authoritative spaces of museums and academia, grassroots memorialisation, like the walking tour, involves the public in the conversation, connecting the environment around them to the past in a personal and emotive way.
Bibliography & Further Reading
Casbeard, Rebecca, 'Slavery Heritage in Bristol: History, memory and forgetting', Annals of Leisure Research, 13.1-2, (2010)
Christian, Mark, 'An African-Centered Approach to the Black British Experience: With Special Reference to Liverpool', Journal of Black Studies, 28.3, (1998)
Christine Chivallon, 'Bristol and the eruption of memory: Making the slave-trading past visible', Social and Cultural Geography, 2.3, (2001)
Donington, Katie, Ryan Hanley, Jessica Moody, Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016)
Kowaleski Wallace, Elizabeth, The British Slave Trade and Public Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)
Moody, Jessica, The Persistence of Memory Remembering Slavery in Liverpool, ‘slaving capital of the world’(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020)
Otele, Olivette, 'Bristol, slavery and the politics of representation: the Slave Trade Gallery in the Bristol Museum', Social Semiotics, 22.2, (2012)
Otele, Olivette, 'The Guerrilla Arts in Brexit Bristol ', in Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain, ed. by Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch(London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
Rice, Alan, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic, Paperback edn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010)