The Battle for Bristol Harbour

This story begins in the late seventeenth century, after the restoration of the monarchy that followed the Civil War. The Royal African Company was an English trading company, sponsored by the king’s brother, the Duke of York, that sent ships down from Bristol Harbour to the West African coast. Funded by merchants including Edward Colston (1636-1721), those ships carried trade goods like cheap guns and cloth to exchange for enslaved West African people. Once trapped in the hellish conditions on board, their next stop was the Caribbean.

Fast-forward to 1895, and Bristol harbour’s colonial complicity was set in stone. The city’s Victorian leaders sought to honour Colston’s generosity as the patron of almshouses and schools, erecting an elaborate, larger-than-life-size bronze statue in the city centre. He also had streets and a huge concert hall named after him.

In 2020, though, the legacy of slavery finally caught up with Edward Colston. That summer Black Lives Matter protests, sparked in the United States by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white police officer, spread across England, joining the legacy of earlier campaigns, like Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa, that had targeted public monuments to white supremacy. Protestors in Bristol dragged Colston’s statue down and threw it into Bristol harbour, making national front pages.

“This was a day I would never forget,” Dylan recalled. By drowning Colston in the harbour, Bristolians declared that they would no longer be silently complicit in the city’s historical links to racial slavery.

At least as far as some were concerned, the effort to reforge Bristol’s Black history transformed the harbour into a symbol of multiculturalism. Instead of the trade in human beings, the flow of water could begin to represent the flow of free people into this multicultural city.

In 1999, city councillor Paul Smith secured the funding for what Dylan fondly calls “lovely Pero’s Bridge.” It’s a memorial to Pero Jones, born into slavery around 1752 on the Caribbean Island of Nevis. Jones spent his early life on a sugar plantation owned by Bristol merchant John Pinney, but arrived in Bristol as a servant when Pinney returned there in 1791. The rest of his family remained in slavery back on Nevis.

Dylan thought that the construction of Pero’s Bridge transformed the harbour into a site of heritage for Black people in Bristol. As it stretches across the water, it symbolises Bristol’s overseas colonial connections with Africa. It also represents an intention to amend past wrongs, by building bridges with Black people from Bristol’s past. Places like this put the harbour at the heart of Bristol’s Black history.

Last July, three young girls were killed by a 17-year-old boy in Southport, two-hundred miles from Bristol. False information, claiming the perpetrator was a Muslim Rwandan immigrant, circulated on social media, igniting far-right riots all over the country.

As the marchers passed the Centre, the St. George’s cross waved patriotically to where the bronze statue of Colston once stood. Continuing downstream, past Pero’s bridge, the rioters chanted their repudiation of everything Bristolians have done to try to transcend the city’s deep roots in the slave trade.

Last summer’s riots violently opposed multiculturalism and immigration, ideas which Bristol harbour has, in recent decades, proudly embodied. Far-right activists, along with the media and politicians who pander to them, sought to roll back years of community investment in Bristol’s Black public history. They aimed to reinstate white domination of that public space.

But they didn’t succeed. A “massive counter-protest,” Dylan told me, defended the harbour and its Black history. Hundreds of local people came out to defend their city, some linking arms to form human shields for vulnerable spaces—including a hotel housing asylum seekers that was targeted by rioters.

Britain is a politically polarised nation. Brexit, social media, declining economic prospects and Westminster itself—which behaves like bickering children on a school playground—have made people feel unrepresented and failed by the country’s political elite. This has pushed and divided people into progressive and extremist movements, making some feel the only way to make themselves heard is to bring violence to the streets.

“The harbour,” Dylan says, “is the centre of everything.” It’s both the heart of Bristol’s Black history and a beacon for racist hate. Most of the time, it’s also a great place for an afternoon in the sun.

Colston’s statue was raised up from the harbour depths just four days after it was put there by protesters in 2020. It’s now on show, as an artefact of the city’s conflict over public memory, at the M Shed museum, right on the waterfront. Elsewhere in the museum, there are press clippings from Bristol’s 1963 bus boycott against racial discrimination. The riots last summer are just one chapter in a long story of contests over space and power.

Maybe if our dominant political parties better represented people’s needs, social conflict would less often boil over into violence. On the other hand, Bristol residents have done a lot together to overcome their city’s legacy of empire and slavery, and to resist the far-right on their doorstep. Last year, a few months before the riots, Bristol Central voters replaced the incumbent Labour MP with Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party.

There is still work to be done, but at least Colston’s statue no longer dominates the city centre. Pero’s Bridge, meanwhile, and all it stands for, is still there.