Campaigners calling for a permanent visitors centre and education venue focused on Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade have submitted a planning application to create one in the city centre.
A coalition of groups have formed the Abolition Shed Collective, and have submitted a full planning application to turn the Seamen’s Mission building on Prince Street, close to The Centre and the Floating Harbour, into a major new venue.
The proposal could transform the boarded up eyesore building - but those behind the project acknowledge they don’t have the money to do it themselves, and have submitted a planning application to get the issue out to be debated publicly.
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The plans were submitted last month and have now been processed and published by Bristol City Council’s planning department. Since the application was submitted, the owner of the former Seamen’s Mission and church building - northern brewery Samuel Smith’s - has put the building up for sale, and is asking around half a million pounds for it.
The building has been empty and unused for decades and that sale came after Bristol City Council’s land chief Cllr Nicola Beech wrote to Samuel Smith’s demanding they do something about two empty and unused city centre sites - the Seamen’s Mission and the empty and fenced off plot of land next to the Arnolfini arts centre, nearby.
The Abolition Shed Collective are a coalition made up of the Bristol Radical History Group, the Countering Colston group and the Long John Silver Trust, and have been backed by Bristol architects Marshall & Kendon, who have drawn up plans for converting the building into a museum and education centre. “The Abolition Shed Collective believe they have an imaginative reuse the historic buildings are crying out for – an Interpretation Centre or Museum for a Memorial to the Victims of Enslavement to be sited nearby – right where this history actually happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” the planning brief submitted by Jeremy Johnson-Marshall and Sam Kendon said.
“To tell the story of anti-slavery campaigners that, combined with African agency and resistance of the enslaved themselves, brought to an end this heinous crime against humanity. Bristol was the pre-eminent slave trading port in the world between the 1720s and 1740s, and this vital fact is little acknowledged, it was also home to one of the strongest pro-slavery lobbies in the country that did their best to continue the slave-system right up to Emancipation in the 1830s and beyond.
“While other slave centres around the world are examining their past, Bristol seems intent on obscuring it and brushing it firmly under the carpet. Some five years ago, at a Slavery Legacy Group meeting, Bristol University Professor Mark Horton stated that Bristol’s international reputation in this regard was abysmal and that the city should use every means at its disposal to rectify the matter.
“He went on to say that the city should be even more ambitious and resourceful than anyone else, in particular, immediate peers such as Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux,” they added.
The campaign group first attempted to generate interest in turning the council-owned O&M Shed building next to Redcliffe Bridge on Welsh Back into an ‘Abolition Shed’ venue, but the city council instead opted to sell the building to developers and the city’s first ‘Box Park’ brand of dining venue is due to open there soon.
Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees has remained unconvinced by the long-running calls for Bristol to have something to educate or remember the city’s role in the slave trade, saying in 2021 that: “It’s just about doing good history, and this has been a part of Bristol’s history, so it needs to be in that story, in all its fullness, not watered down, not embellished, just a factual account of what Bristol was involved in,” he said.
“But it’s important to remember that the history of African people is not just one of slavery, and that’s the other danger - that well-meaning people say ‘right, well, let’s do a slavery thing’, so the sum total of my engagement with my history is about slavery - well, that’s not good enough. That doesn’t lift me up.
“There are many things good things that have happened in, around, through and beyond that particular piece of African history,” he added.
Mark Steeds, from the Abolition Shed Collective, said the idea was to create a place where everyone in Bristol could learn more about the city’s past, as well as remember the victims of the city’s role in slavery.
That, he said, would focus on the African Diaspora of enslaved people, but also the indigenous people in the lands colonised for the past 500 years, and also the indentured servants and bonded labour from Bristol and the West Country who were forced in their thousands to be shipped to the New World of North America and the Caribbean to work on plantations.
Mr Steeds acknowledged that the Abolition Shed Coalition was submitting a planning application for a building it didn’t own to create a project that it doesn’t have the money for.
“This is about getting this issue out there and discussed,” he said. “We want to start a conversation about Bristol, its history and how we can all acknowledge and learn from it. Too often, whenever there’s talk about street names and statues, it becomes divisive. What we want to do is have somewhere everyone can go and learn more about this part of Bristol’s history that is not really told, acknowledged or remembered,” he added.
“Bristol also played an important role in the Abolition movement, and there needs to be recognition of that.
“This is a real opportunity here, because this building is empty, it’s right in the heart of where this history happened, and it’s time Bristol caught up. Other places like Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux have got to grips with this, have museums, memorials and education centres that are successful. Bristol can and should do the same,” he added.
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