Small reminders of Britain’s slaving past

Instead of another large slavery memorial, Aidan Turner-Bishop suggests that it would be better to have lots of small local reminders like Germany’s Stolpersteine. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

There is a slave trade memorial in Lancaster (Letters, 2 January). It is Kevin Dalton-Johnson’s Captured Africans, unveiled in 2005. Rather than erect another slavery memorial in London or Liverpool, maybe we need lots of small local reminders like Germany’s Stolpersteine (stumbling stones), which commemorate victims of the Holocaust. The influence of the slave trade was so pervasive, yet largely unknown to many. Small reminders could be outside, for example, Harewood House in West Yorkshire (Lascelles family’s sugar plantations), Dent churchyard in Cumbria (graves of the notorious Sill slaver family), or the site of the Royal African Company’s headquarters in London. A single memorial, especially in London, conceals the extent and depth of the slave trade’s continuing influence.
Aidan Turner-Bishop
Preston

• In the early 1970s, when I lived in Clifton, the Georgian district of Bristol, I was taken to the basement of a friend’s house where there were manacles on the wall which he said were used to hold in-transit slaves.
Robert Tilleard
Salisbury, Wiltshire

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