Bristol’s Empty Plinth: Why Black History Matters

As our nation celebrates Juneteenth today, I’m thinking about how I, as a white travel writer from the USA, can do better when it comes to representation in my work. On a dreary March day last year, in the unlikeliest of places, I stumbled upon the most vivid lesson so far about the importance of learning about and amplifying underrepresented voices. 

In the center of Bristol — an hour and half by train west of London, where the River Avon meets the sea — stands an empty plinth. It’s in the middle of the city’s inviting main promenade, which is lined with statues, benches, big shops, and glitzy theaters. There’s so much going on here that if the plinth weren’t pointed out to you, you’d never notice it.

But when you scrutinize it, the plinth tells a fascinating story. On the base, a panel explains that, in 1895, its missing statue was “erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city.”

Around the sides of the plinth are more panels. The one on the right shows a strange constellation of mer-beasts: a mermaid, a merman, and some sort of mer-horse, with Pegasus-like fin-wings. The panel behind the plinth illustrates a tale of a large fish (or maybe a dolphin) who got its head stuck in the porthole of a ship.

And the panel on the left side shows this “virtuous and wise” person addressing a crowd of enslaved Africans. One of the people holds their hand open, as if asking for something; Mr. Virtuous reaches back, as if granting them precisely what they require.

The statue that once topped the plinth was of Edward Colston (1636-1721), a fabulously wealthy Bristolian who was known for his success in financial matters, and for his generous philanthropy to the city that made him. Colston amassed much of his wealth by enslaving human beings from the continent of Africa and shipping them to the Americas, where they were sold to other human beings — dooming them to generations of suffering and disadvantage. (In other words, the panel showing the “grateful” enslaved Africans is as much a myth as the mer-creatures on the opposite side of the plinth.)

Colston was a big success at business, and a generous benefactor of the city. And he was also, in our modern parlance, an utter piece of shit. His legacy is complicated, and certainly not as clear-cut as “virtuous and wise.” So what’s a city to do?

Bristolians came up with one solution, back in the summer of 2020. In the global protests following the murder by police of George Floyd, Bristolians pulled Colston off his plinth, dragged him a few blocks down to the Floating Harbour, and pushed him over the railing into the mucky water.

If you walk about 10 minutes downhill from the empty plinth — first along the promenade, then on a covered, waterfront walkway called the Watershed — you come to a modern footbridge. Here again, if you weren’t looking for it, you might miss a small plaque on a railing that explains what happened on June 7, 2020: “At this spot, during worldwide anti-racism protests, a statue celebrating the 17th century slave-trader Edward Colston was thrown into the harbour by the people of Bristol. Various campaigns to have the statue removed through official channels had been frustrated.”

Was this vandalism? Or a courageous act of civil disobedience? I’m sure you have your opinion. Or maybe you’re torn. At the time, watching this on the news from Seattle, a large part of me cheered the action, while another part thought, “But surely there must be another way?”

And yet, I must admit: Standing there on the Bristol harborfront, I felt a visceral sense of relief that the statue is gone. Whether a symbol is removed through fully legal means, or otherwise, seeing that plinth and that plaque forced me to unpack the ugly business of how we can constructively and honestly grapple with historical figures who aren’t just virtuous or just evil. Which, if you dig deeply enough, is essentially all of them.

Throughout Bristol, I kept encountering echoes of this same struggle — differing approaches to wrestling with the legacy of Colston.

Close to Bristol Meads train station, the parish church of St. Mary Radcliffe is filled with monuments and memorials to great Bristolians. For example, they love to tell the story of John Cabot, who sailed to and named Newfoundland soon after Christopher Columbus’ journey. Cabot (with his ship, The Matthew) is even the subject of his very own stained-glass window.

Just across the nave from Cabot is another wall of stained glass. But the bottom panels of this section are missing — they’re simply blank frosted panes. A nearby information board thoughtfully explains that these panes, too, once honored Edward Colston, and were removed by the church around the time that his statue toppled into the harbor. They acknowledge this is a prickly issue and have not yet decided what to do with those windows. But they want people looking for them to know the full history.

This seemed to me a reasonable solution: Colston is still being acknowledged, and his full story is being told, even as the windows celebrating him are in purgatory (at least, for now).

If you disagree with toppling statues and removing stained-glass windows, I’m guessing your argument is (ostensibly) that this constitutes a “loss of history.” But is that really what we’re seeing here? The windows aren’t gone without a trace; they have been replaced with a more complete retelling of the history.

My visit to Bristol made it clear that these worries about “erasing history” miss a critical nuance: We can remember Colston without honoring him.

The best illustration of this came in Bristol’s city history museum, called the M-Shed (for the old maritime warehouse that it occupies). Here I found a painting from the 1930s entitled “Some Who Have Made Bristol Famous.” It’s a giant composite that throws together a couple dozen historic Bristolians — who lived in massively different eras — onto a single canvas, as if they’re mingling at some afterlife cocktail party. Among those in attendance is Colston, who looks, frankly, pretty nondescript for all the agony he caused during his lifetime. Just another bewigged dead white guy. He rubs his chin as if pondering regrets. Or maybe just wondering if his profit model will support a price increase.

Next to the painting, a key identifies each figure and explains what they did. For Colston, that identification says simply this: “Slave trader; merchant and philanthropist.”

This solution feels, to me, perhaps the most reasonable way to handle these complex figures: To remember them honestly, completely, and accurately — their bad deeds and their good deeds. Colston did many great things for Bristol; Colston’s actions lead to the disruption of countless lives, and the suffering and deaths of many. He was a philanthropist. He was a slave trader.

To tell the story of Colston, we don’t necessarily have to celebrate him as “virtuous.” We can surround him with context. For example, in that same M-Shed history museum, almost within sight of Colston’s portrait, is a thoughtful exhibit explaining the transatlantic slave trade. It pointedly tells that story from the perspective of the Africans whom Colston enslaved to enrichen himself and his community. This delicate balance of multiple narratives — including ones that have for too long been overlooked — seems the only reasonable way to begin a constructive dialogue.

Bristol has admirably embarked on the painful process of reckoning with their tarnished past. (This isn’t surprising; the city has a reputation within England as being progressive and protest-minded.) The city’s solutions are varied, and each one is imperfect. But at least they’re doing something, rather than just making excuses. And being here made me wish more American cities would attempt to honestly grapple with the full complexity of their own history.

Another lesson I learned that day in Bristol is why this matters. As I stood there in the cold drizzle, pondering the empty plinth, Bristolians buzzed around me. They were busy, going places. Talking on their phones, listening to music or podcasts, walking the dog, rushing to a meeting, out strolling at lunchtime. And I was suddenly keenly aware that several of the Bristolians walking past me were people of color.

It’s so easy for a subject (like controversial statues) to become so politicized that it unmoors from common sense and humanity. I find that when I’m traveling — forcibly pulled from the comfort of my news bubble and inserted into a different cultural context — I’m more open to epiphanies. And on this day, my epiphany was this:

Why should a person of color who lives in Bristol have to walk past, every day, a statue celebrating a man who enslaved their ancestors for personal profit? And, in particular, why should they be confronted, every day, with the message that this person was “virtuous”?

Intellectually, this was something I already understood. But standing on that Bristol boulevard, I felt it. The fact that it took me a 5,000-mile journey to have this epiphany is an indication of my privilege… and a reminder of the value of travel.

When you’re on the road — if you’re doing it right — you are more open to ideas. Curious. Empathetic. To a white person, someone like Colston is easy to see simply as a part of our founding narrative — a man who helped build our city or nation. To a person of color, that same figure is a symbol of hatred, racism, and trauma. But all too often, the way Colston and others like him are treated in our parks, squares, museums, and history books reflects only one of those perspectives.

And yet, the uncomfortable presence of humanity has a way of making “complicated” things simple. You can argue, in the abstract, that the way this particular statue was removed was not appropriate. But even if the means were questionable, on this day it was clear to me that the end was correct: The statue’s removal was the only way for a civilized and compassionate society to move forward. The only tragedy here is that it took yet another Black life snuffed out, halfway around the world, for Bristol finally to take this step.

Visiting these sights of Bristol, it was clear to me: Colson is not erased; history has not been lost. Colson has been properly contextualized, and a more complete and honest story is being told. The statue is gone; the plinth remains, not as a monument to Colston, but as a commemoration of the long, hard fight to counter racism in our society.  In a world wracked by furious disagreement, consensus is elusive. But I suspect that something resembling consensus might exist somewhere among the solutions I observed in Bristol.

There’s a lot of talk in American society today about whether the story of Black Americans deserves to be included in the story of the USA. Most of the rationale behind removing these uncomfortable details from our textbooks, as I understand it, is that “we don’t want our young people to feel bad about our history.” There are two obvious problems with this thinking: First, there is no society on earth that does not feel at least a little bad about their history (though we have more to atone for than most). And second, what about “our young people” whose stories are being removed from our curricula, and whose life experiences are not allowed to be discussed by our teachers?

In the end, I think those who wish to sanitize American history are fundamentally terrified of holding our ancestors accountable for their crimes. I wish I could share with those people the experience of going to a faraway place and having an exhilarating epiphany like the one I had in Bristol: suddenly seeing what we wanted to believe was “the whole story” through new eyes…and finding that it’s far more nuanced than we imagined. 

Standing there in Bristol, looking at that empty plinth, I was filled with a clarity about the righteousness of shining a light on the inconvenient stories that have been brushed aside by history. It’s liberating. It’s just. And it feels good.