Help us to remember London’s shrouded past!
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How would you commemorate London’s involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade?
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Following Museum Director David Spence’s appeal on BBC Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ for Londoners to take hold of their history please have your say on an existing monument to London’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
Robert Milligan (c.1746-1809) was one of the individuals responsible for the realisation of the West India Docks. His statue (above and right) currently stands in front of the Museum in Docklands.
Milligan was a wealthy West India merchant and ship-owner. Outraged at losses due to theft and delay at London's riverside wharves, Milligan headed a group of powerful businessmen who planned and built West India Docks. The Museum in Docklands is housed in one of the old sugar storage warehouses.
The wealth Milligan and his colleagues enjoyed was directly related to the suffering of many thousands of enslaved Africans who were forcibly removed from their homes in West Africa to work and die on the plantations
Milligan is commemorated only for the wealth and the engineering accomplishment that the West India Dock’s represent. Nowhere in the West India Docks or the surrounding Canary Wharf area is the reality of this horrific slave trade acknowledged.
Help expose London’s hidden heritage! To commemorate the bicentenary of the parliamentary abolition of the transatlantic Slave Trade in 2007 the Museum in Docklands would like to re-interpret the memorial to Milligan. How would you respond to the statue? How would you show everyone that slavery built the West India Docks and changed the face of London?
A new statue, a play on the quayside, a film projection, a change to the current statue – you decide!
Please send your ideas to rcampbell@museumindocklands.org.uk
Listen to David Spence on Radio 4 describe the project and the Museum’s plans for remembering Slavery, its abolition and its enduring legacy at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours//