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  • London, Sugar and Slavery

  • Until Aug 30 2010
    • Critics' Choice
  • Museum in Docklands, Hertsmere Rd, London, E14 4AL
  • Rating:
  • Museum in Docklands

  • By Peter Watts

    Posted: Mon Nov 5 2007

  • Londoners have an uneasy relationship with the legacy of slavery in their city, which is why when the subject is raised they can be so quick to deflect attention towards Liverpool or Bristol, to African complicity on the Slave Coast or towards the equally despicable and overlapping Arab slave trade. It’s also why none of London’s many museums has wanted to confront slavery in its own galleries – that is, until the Museum in Docklands unveils a permanent exhibition this weekend.

    Precisely constructed with the help of community groups – which explains the understandable but awkward use of language such as ‘enslaved Africans’ rather than ‘slaves’ – the gallery offers an unusual angle on a divisive subject. There’s lots of visual art – portraits of London-based traders and the docks at work – to make up for the dearth of physical objects that reflect London’s role (although Wilberforce’s ‘Liberty Table’, at which at which terms of the 1807 Slave Trade Act were hammered out, takes up a prominent position). The artwork, alongside a very conscious attempt to play up the role of dissenting black voices, both as slaves in revolt and as abolitionists in Victorian London, serve to escape the usual narrative of white patricians. At the start, good use of statistics helps get over the scale of the trade in London, while at the tail the exhibition carefully examines the connections between the arguments made for and against slavery with the idiom of contemporary racism.

    The gallery has been arranged so that it can also double as a performance space, and an area has been set aside for visiting groups to construct their own ‘mini-exhibitions’ to cover areas that they feel the curators may have missed. The museum has concurrently put together a website that will allow visitors to learn about key slave trade sites in London, including chapels where abolitionists met and insurance companies’ headquarters that grew fat on trafficked humans. With the National Maritime Museum also preparing to confront the subject with its forthcoming Atlantic Gallery, it seems London is finally, and uncomfortably, coming to turns with this ugly aspect of its past.
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  • Details

  • Museum in Docklands, Hertsmere Rd, London, E14 4AL
    , UK
    Geo: 51.507646, -0.023817
  • 0870 444 3857
  • Category: Museums & Attractions
  • Times: Daily 10am-6pm (last adm 5.30pm)
  • Tube: Canary Wharf
  • Rail: West India Quay DLR

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