Bristol Commission Recommends Contested Statue Should Go to City Museum

The statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston that was toppled during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020 should be permanently displayed in a museum, on its side and defaced with red paint, according to a recently released report commissioned by the city’s mayor. The recommendation follows the acquittal of four protesters charged with causing criminal damage after pulling down the statue and rolling it off Bristol’s dock.

The independent We Are Bristol History Commission group recommended that the contested monument be preserved in the defaced state it was in when pulled from the harbor. Since then, it has been exhibited at the city’s M Shed Museum beside information on the transatlantic slave trade. The report also said the still-standing plinth that held the statue should host temporary art commissions that reflect important issues for Bristol and, on occasion, be left empty as a reminder of the statue’s toppling.

In the report, the commission wrote, “We recommend that attention is paid to presenting the history in a nuanced, contextualized and engaging way, including information on the broader history of the enslavement of people of African descent.”

Out of the 14,000 people who responded to the citywide survey, around 80 percent said the statute should go on display in a Bristol museum, while 65 percent supported adding a plaque to the plinth commemorating the protest. More than half of the respondents supported using the plinth as a stage for temporary art exhibitions. Some Bristol residents offered ideas on how to deal with the monument, including breaking it in half and placing one half on the plinth and the other in a museum. Another respondent suggested reinstalling it as part of a new tradition of “hauling it down and throwing it in the harbor once a year.”

Colston was a wealthy merchant and a major philanthropist in Bristol, and, as a member of the Royal African Company, he was actively involved in the African slave trade. In June 2020, amid global protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, monuments to historical figures with legacies of colonialism and racism were defaced or removed from view around the world. That June, a group of protesters were filmed spraying the statue of Colston with red paint before tying ropes around its neck and dragging it from its plinth. The statue was then rolled off the dock to cheers from the crowd.

In the wake of its removal, Rhian Graham was charged alongside Milo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby of tying the rope, while Jake Skuse was accused of throwing it in the water. The four pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Colston case comes amid reignited debate in the UK over the legacy of public artworks. In January, a man was arrested for attacking an Eric Gill statue installed outside the BBC headquarters in central London. The suspect struck the statue with a hammer over four hours while a second man filmed the incident. Gill, one of the leading British sculptors and typographers of the 20th century, was a known pedophile. The statue features representations of Prospero and Ariel from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Ariel, a spirit in service to the magician, is depicted as a naked child.

Successive Campaigners have called on the BBC to remove the sculpture. Following the latest attack, the broadcasting company said in statement that it “doesn’t condone the views or actions of Eric Gill.” It continued: “Clearly there are debates about whether you can separate the work of an artist from the art itself. We think the right thing to do is for people to have those discussions. We don’t think the right approach is to damage the artwork itself.”