One of my favourite places to visit as a child was Styal country park. We were National Trust kids and every weekend my parents would cart my sister and I off beyond the outskirts of Greater Manchester to reap the benefits of fresh air in our lungs and mud under our fingernails. Styal, with its leafy forests and sun-dappled paths winding over the River Bollin, had a certain magic.
A key feature of the park was the historic Quarry Bank mill. With red bricks, towering chimneys and functioning water wheel, it is one of the best surviving examples of an early textile mill, and it’s open to the public. I used to love running my hands over the polished wood of the machinery, reading placards about the Industrial Revolution, and marvelling at old pictures of cotton spinning.
What those placards failed to divulge was where all the cotton came from. Nor was there any word about how the mill’s owner, Samuel Greg, inherited the textiles firm from uncles who had made their fortunes from a sugar plantation in the West Indies. Of course, it’s hardly a reach to connect the booming cotton trade of the 1800s to transatlantic slavery, but those links were thoroughly played down during my childhood. Now, as part of the long-term gallery displays, Quarry Bank’s connections with slavery are interpreted through text and archival objects. One item on display is a plantation journal, which identifies a number of enslaved people who were in the ownership of the Greg family, on their Caribbean sugar plantations of Hillsborough in Dominica and Cane Garden in St Vincent.
As a Black Mancunian with Jamaican heritage, it’s painful to confront the complicity of my beloved home town in such a horrific system of oppression. But it is even more painful to recognise that this complicity was actively obscured over the years – and is still ignored by many institutions.
The Quarry Bank mill, and now the Guardian, are not the only Manchester-born institutions that are now reckoning with their exploitative roots. In 2021, the Royal Exchange Theatre launched a project exploring its links with colonialism, empire and slavery, after it was revealed that its building was originally used to trade in cotton and other products that came from plantations. Last year, the University of Manchester published preliminary research showing some of the connections that early donors to the university had to slavery.
I have a huge sense of pride in being from Manchester. That pride has only intensified since I moved away for work a decade ago. I grew up there, spent my formative years in the city, my mum and my childhood friends are still there, and I come home to visit as often as Avanti trains allow. My accent intensifies when I’m speaking passionately about something, or feeling homesick. I’ve considered getting a bee tattoo on more than one occasion.
This pride is partly tribalism and nostalgia, and the powerful rose-tinted aura that belongs to the streets that hold your earliest memories. But it also comes from the stories I have been told about Manchester. It’s a city of radicals, a city of rebellion and standing up for what is right. It’s the city that was home to Friedrich Engels as he fought for workers’ rights, and the birthplace of Emmeline Pankhurst who helped women win the right to vote. It has always felt like a place that has celebrated its diversity, with its large Caribbean community integral to the cultural and social makeup of the city.
This history is not erased by the recent conversations about the city’s links to slavery, but it does mean the story we tell ourselves about Manchester – of industry and innovation, of protest and freedom fighters – is not the whole picture. For me, it feels as though two parallel versions of the city have opened up alongside each other. It is a disconnect I recognise. The same disconnect that allows our education system to teach slavery as though only the United States were involved, or to wax lyrical about our kings and queens without mentioning the violence of imperialism.
At school, our slavery lesson involved a bus journey down the M62 to Liverpool. There, the International Slavery Museum was clear about the city’s role in the slave trade, how Liverpool built its wealth through being Europe’s largest slave port, how its population and economy boomed as a result. But we could have had a similar lesson closer to home.
My pride in being a Mancunian is not predicated on the city having a spotless history. That would be a naive and unrealistic expectation of any city, town or industry in Britain – the legacies of wealth derived from slavery are so far-reaching that few institutions that are a few hundred years old or similar could claim to have clean hands. But to keep that pride alive, I need to understand the real history of Manchester, not the history with gaping holes and hastily applied layers of gloss.
What is happening at the Guardian and at other Mancunian institutions that are only now confronting their past, is a microcosm of what needs to happen across the rest of the country. We can no longer accept a version of the past with the awkward parts redacted or skipped over. The first step towards restorative justice must always be confrontation, acknowledgment and honesty. It’s time for Britain – Manchester included – to be clear-eyed about the ways it has directly benefited from the atrocities of the slavery economy. You can’t move forward if you’re unable to confront the realities of where you came from.
• Natalie Morris is the author of Mixed/Other: Explorations of Multiraciality in Modern Britain
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