I can’t help but wonder what discussions took place behind the scenes in each of these places to shift the national conversation about slavery and its legacies. But that’s not how change happens: in reality, these decisions were the product of thousands of conversations in local communities. It has become common to describe all these developments as simply a reaction to the killing of George Floyd and the enormous protests that followed.

One colleague told me how pleasantly surprised she was to visit a local monument with her children and find a plaque explaining the building’s links to slavery and colonialism. Some, including the statue of the enslaver Robert Milligan outside the Museum of London Docklands, were removed while others, such as the statues inside the Guildhall of the plantation owner and enslaver William Beckford, and Sir John Cass, an MP and investor in the Royal African Company, have been retained but with new explanatory plaques. Before 2020, I didn’t know much about the statues in London linked to slavery. It was met with fierce backlash from the national government, who passed legislation that required the government to approve the removal of any public statue.īut the impact has been unmistakable. It was also an intensely local one, with the drive for change being driven by community activists and politicians. This wasn’t a coordinated movement individual organisations and activists largely did this work independent from each other. Suddenly, there was a national discussion about how to understand and contextualise these monuments: would they be better displayed in museums? Should they have new plaques added? Or be removed altogether? In all of these places, questions were raised about how communities should reckon with the past.

The Welsh government commissioned an audit of public monuments and across the country 130 Labour-led councils, including in the cities of London, Manchester and Birmingham, announced similar reviews. It was a moment that altered how our public spaces engage with history.

In the following six months there was an unprecedented public reckoning with the legacies of slavery in Britain – most visibly in the removal or alteration of almost 70 tributes to enslavers and colonialists, including 39 names on streets, buildings and schools, as well as 30 statues, plaques and other memorials. A fter the statue of enslaver Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol in June 2020 and dumped into the city harbour, ripples spread across the UK.

The fallen aerie and reckoning