Liverpool Black History Walking Tour (part 1)

From St. John’s Gardens to Liverpool Town Hall

Between the end of the seventeenth century and middle of the nineteenth, sail ships from Liverpool forcibly transported more than 1.35 million shackled Africans to slavery in the Americas, practically three times’ the population of today’s city: ghastly arithmetic relayed to tourgoers by Laurence Westgaph, Historian in Residence for National Museums Liverpool. The wealth accrued by those engaged directly (trading in human flesh) and indirectly (trading in slave-produced goods) remains visible – unconsciously commemorated, even – in the urban environment, not least in respect of contemporary street names, over 150 of which were so named because a slave trader/merchant owned the respective land.

With the toppling of slave owner Edward Colston’s statue (Bristol, UK) specifically, and the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd (Minneapolis, US) more generally, many Liverpudlians as well as those from further afield sought to (re)familiarise themselves with the region’s slavery links to critically assess the merits of HM Government’s “retain and explain” policy on street names and problematic statuary. Yet the demand for places on Laurence’s free walking tours far outstripped supply, supply that was abruptly cut off with the adoption of COVID-19 rule-of-six measures. (Laurence leads eight tours, each of which can be booked via Eventbrite, while his Facebook group – ‘Liverpool and Slavery’ – keeps followers updated on how tour donations are helping to fund Liverpool’s Enslaved Memorial Project.)

Holding the belief that the need for social distance shouldn’t preclude curious souls from getting up close with unsanitised history, this local historian devised a self-guided “dark tourism” trail (linking sites from a number of tours) for locals/visitors to gain a better understanding of how Liverpool capitalised on the murderous exploitation of enslaved Africans and thereby help redress the imbalance of what many of my generation (b.1983) and older were taught at school: more the role of gatekeeper (abolition) and less the poacher (enslaver). (“Dark tourism”, according to Philip Stone, author of 111 Dark Places in England That You Shouldn’t Miss (2021), is ‘the act of travelling to sites of death, disaster, or the seemingly macabre’.)

The connection between charity and brutality is something to ponder over while standing/sitting in St. John’s Gardens, a manicured public space across the road from the entrances to the Central Library and World Museum (the construction of which was partly financed through the slave-accrued wealth of merchant-benefactor William Brown) from where you can admire the west façade of the visually arresting St. George’s Hall in the distance, but where statues of two men associated with slavery loom large in the foreground: Arthur Bower Forwood, a blockade-runner for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and William Gladstone (Images 2, 3 & 4), the iconic status of whom is increasingly contested as the former prime minister is deemed no longer immune to revision.

 

 

 

Having made your way back to the entrance of the World Museum, continue (west) in the direction previously walking/wheeling, following the pavement around to the right before crossing the traffic lights on Byrom Street. Ahead of you is Dale Street, albeit slightly off to the left, just beyond Fontenoy Street on your right and a car park adjacent to the entrance of the Mersey (Queensway) Tunnel on your left. Continue advancing (west) along this busy throughfare – one of the seven original streets comprising “Liuerpul” situated within today’s commercial district – for approximately 650 metres until you reach the Town Hall, located at the top of Water Street, a total of 800 metres from William Brown Street. Grade I-listed, this neoclassical gem is one of the finest surviving Georgian buildings in Britain notwithstanding its modification, extension and reconstruction (Image 5). The south and east fronts survive, the latter of which is decorated with friezes of an African in feathered headdress and an elephant. Hiding in plain sight, albeit above the windows, these exotic emblems of mercantile trade identify the source of a proportion of Liverpool’s wealth through civic glorification (Image 6), illustrating its shameful role as a port from where floating jails departed during what Laurence calls an ‘unacknowledged Holocaust’ or “Maafa”, Kiswahili for “great tragedy”. (The Holocaust is without comparison, meaning serious writers ought to tread carefully when contemplating an analogy, though pedants are reminded of the gargantuan, trans-oceanic demographic assault – involving the displacement and premature death of twelve-and-a-half million enslaved persons – that the Transatlantic Slave Trade embodied.)

 

Address: Liverpool Town Hall, High Street, Liverpool, L2 3SW.

Financed by the town’s slave-trading elites, such as the Blundell, Cunliffe, Earle and Heywood families, it was built in 1754 by a firm owned by Joseph Brooks, uncle to namesake Joseph Brooks Jnr. and co-owner of a ship the Brooks (or Brookes), which was immortalised in the 1787/8 cross-sectional sketch of (c.480) slaves tightly packed below decks in the pestilential hold; Brooks Alley, named after the landowning Brooks family, is one of the twenty streets identified by Liverpool City Council in 2020 as needing a reinterpretation notice. In 1781, the same year of its construction, a massacre occurred aboard the Zong, another infamous slaver co-owned by a Liverpudlian. William Gregson (after which Gregson Street is named, but which doesn’t feature in the aforementioned top 20) headed a syndicate of merchants, one investor being his son John, who would – following in his father’s footsteps – be elected Mayor of Liverpool in 1784, only months after the court case(s, the second being the insurer’s appeal against the initial judgement in favour of the Gregsons) provided the starkest illumination that captives became insurable cargo akin to livestock.

Although the tragic details are well known (aided in part by J.M.W Turner’s 1840 canvas, The Slave Ship, what art historian Simon Schama labels the ‘greatest British painting of the nineteenth century’) they merit repetition, not only because the Zong case is a microcosm of the inhumanity of the trade in humans, but because these Black lives mattered: 133 African men, women and children were jettisoned due to a putative water shortage (arising from navigational incompetence) into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean Sea by the captain who – as a loyal servant of the voyage’s shareholders – sought to transfer potential “losses” (ill captives were less profitable at slave auctions) from the owners to the underwriter. The loss of 132 souls (100 additional enslaved Africans perished during the Middle Passage, according to the Slave Trade Database, leaving only 208 out of 440 to disembark) became a cause célèbre for abolitionists, while the two-page court report (Gregson vs. Gilbert) inspired a contemporary poet, namely M. NourbeSe Philip and her book-length poem (Zong!, 2008) which, through group-readings, helps ensure that their story remains alive 240 years on.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the mercantile community dominated the town’s governance, and concomitantly influenced its burgeoning development as an urban centre, since each of its 20 Mayors between 1787 and 1807 were involved in the slave trade, either as a ship owner or an investor, as were all the borough’s MPs until William Roscoe in 1806. This leads Laurence to claim that the Town Hall is the ‘single greatest architectural monument to Liverpool’s involvement’. It’s arguably this building that actor George Frederick Cooke alluded to as being one comprised of bricks ‘cemented [together] by the blood of a negro’ when hissed on stage at Williamson Square’s old Theatre Royal in 1806, a fact not lost on protestors in 1999 who took umbrage with the Town Hall being the venue from where a formal apology was declared after a debate into the port’s prominent role in the trafficking of Africans.

 

Sixty-seven Mayors were involved (directly as investors) in 1,886 slave voyages between 1703-1807 according to local historian David Hearn, author of The Slave Streets of Liverpool (2020) and the forthcoming Liverpool’s Legacy of Slavery, the latter of which features a damning figure (arrived at simplistically, granted, but not without a relative degree of confidence through mathematical equation): 450,000. This is the number of Africans that Mayors – referred to as ‘kidnapers (sic) who infested the highest municipal offices’ by Trinidadian scholar-statesman Eric Williams in his magnum opus Capitalism and Slavery (1944), recently republished by Penguin Press – collectively were responsible for uprooting and transporting into a life of forced servitude and premature death (approximately 12% died even more prematurely during the Middle Passage across four centuries) through cutting sugar cane and picking cotton on plantations in the Americas. The enslaved had, to quote philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a ‘nasty, brutish, and [all too frequently] short’ existence.

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This is the first of a three-part article.

You can read part two at: https://travelthruhistory.com/liverpool-black-history-walking-tour-part-2-of-3/

About the author:
A frequent ‘Letter of the Month’ winner in UK travel newspapers/magazines, Lee P. Ruddin’s entry in Senior Travel Expert’s 2018 (Heritage) Writing Competition was shortlisted as Highly Commended by judges; his entry in I Must Be Off’s 2020 contest was longlisted. His articles feature in Robert Fear’s Travel Stories and Highlights: 2019 Edition, on the websites of Hotel Metropole Hanoi and Bath’s Royal Crescent Hotel, as well as at TravelMag. In addition to tips appearing on theguardian.com, he has reviewed travel guides for LoveReading and NetGalley and, to date, has travelled in and via 45 countries on four continents. Born in Birkenhead on the Wirral in North-West England, he currently resides in Birmingham, where he works in the security industry.

All photos by Lee P. Ruddin