Memoryscapes are both personal and shared, we each have a patchwork of memories of feelings, smells, sounds, encounters with creatures, places and plants that make a map of the world we inhabit. Memoryscapes are also corporate and institutional, manipulated by those in authority to generate particular narratives and to silence and disable others. My creative work, walking and asking questions, attends to both the personal and the institutional. In both respects the toppling statue of Edward Colston looms over the book Breaking the Dead Silence, the idea for the publication conceived in the immediate aftermath of the June 2020 events. Responding to an open call, nineteen diverse authors contributed: activists, academics, historians and heritage professionals. Each chapter explores, directly or indirectly, a response, commentary or experience in the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd and the renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide.

The title references Jane Austen’s description of ‘the dead silence’, a closed down conversation, a silence that is not allowed to become an argument, in which there is no fuel for contestation or any further sound of agreement or disagreement. At the time the events of 2020 appeared to shatter the prevailing silence on white supremacism and the legacies of chattel slavery and colonialism; a new richer, more honest, more open heritage narrative appeared to be emerging, even in Bath. Chapters in the book discuss some of those initiatives in the changing memoryscape. My own chapter, however, with a first draft completed in the autumn of that year became less optimistic, I recount my experience in Bath, from delivering a commissioned cycle of walks in Bath’s Sydney Gardens to a walk being cancelled.

As dust settled on the drying out statue lying in the dark of a Bristol museum warehouse I received a phone call withdrawing a commission for an intervention at the gala reopening of Sydney Gardens. I was informed that the content of the walk was  ‘inappropriate for such a celebratory event’. I reflected on how, once the lever of National Lottery funding is removed, Bath’s white parochial fragility returns and the pervasive silence rises up elegantly, discretely closing out the uncomfortable. Exhibitions disappear to become foot notes on websites, video links dropped, information sheets locked away. This was the case following the Lottery funded 2007 commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade exhibitions at The Holburne and at Beckford’s Tower; it remains to be seen if recent muted acknowledgements in the city will go the same way.

Despite the frisson that the toppling of the Colston Statue sent through the heritage institutions of Bath, acknowledgement or apology of any kind from these institutions has yet to find a permanent voice, least of all from the custodians of Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Acknowledgement and apology for chattel slavery and the other atrocities of colonialism are widely recognised as the first essential steps towards psychological, cultural and financial repair. Professor Olivette Otele wrote about ‘reluctant’ sites of memory: places whose custodians deny or obscure connections with a particular uncomfortable or contested past, where mourning and reflection is made difficult or acts of remembrance prevented.

Reluctant Sites of Memory are mirrors into our past and present. They are oblique but powerful reflections of our abilities to forget, remember and create knowledge despite social, cultural and economic impediments.  (Otele 2018)

Other academics have written about how these haunted and wounded places teem with unheard voices and stories. Over these past ten years as an artist-researcher, walking and asking questions I have learned about colonial exploitation, forced migration and looting, all hidden in plain sight in Bristol and Bath. From Bath’s UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and the old port of Bristol to the coastal cities of the UK and beyond, public sites of memory have yet to fully acknowledge the atrocities committed in the creation of the wealth they manifest.

In 2014 for the opening of Bath Spa University’s Commons building at Newton Park, I presented an installation using media gathered collaboratively on a walk between the old brassmill at Saltford and Clevedon Pools, Bath. The brassmills along the River Avon were, in many respects, the mint for the trade in West African people’s lives, producing, amongst other items, brass manillas, wearable wealth, the currency of the slave trade. The wealth generated through the labour of those enslaved is embodied in Bath where slaveowners came to play, network and bathe. Walking beside the river we made visceral, watery connections: water drove the mills that made the brass items, these items were transported via water, as were the enslaved Africans, water irrigated the sugar and it was water, hot and cold, that their enslavers enjoyed in Bath. Millions of Africans died in the long years of the TransAtlantic Traffic those forced onto the ships and became ill or resisted or both were thrown overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, flesh, bones and memory in the sea. Whether it is the rain that falls cool over Bath or that which seeps down to hot rocks to return as hot springs, that rain comes off the Atlantic.  As poet, Derek Walcott wrote, The Sea is History (2008)

Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed (2010) and others it is my view that to be part of the constructed amnesia and the forgetting of injustice is to become complicit in its persistence. Racism and its inverse, white supremacism, became structural through the TransAtlantic Traffic in Enslaved Africans and fundamental to European colonialism. My view, as a white man, is that without reaching back to and owning that past Britain remains shackled to it. Making a way, walking and asking questions, I attend to complicity, racialisation and white privilege; I seek to become more alert, this non-confrontational somatic approach is my way of sharing that becoming.

Together in those reluctant sites of memory, listening, sense-ing, asking questions with our whole bodies we find ways of hearing the unheard, of discovering and renewing the telling of forgotten stories. Our conversations often turn to the long lasting legacies of enslavement and colonial extraction and its fundamental impact on how we make sense of ourselves and the world.  Walkers disseminate this even if only as questions, for these individuals and for many others that includes urgent questions on offering and demanding apology.

Bath Spa University, as the heritage custodian of two if not three sites begging for an acknowledgement of the wealth they represent, has  much to consider. At Newton Park, standing on the shoulders of other labourers in the archive, I hosted a walk for Heritage Open Days in September. We were promised a cream tea at the end and although I had to up sell it, the potential juxtaposition was pregnant with possibilities for a delicious closing provocation. I opened the walk with David Dabydeen’s comment (2008) that there is an inextricable link between the English Country Estate and the Caribbean Plantation. We followed entangled threads to touch the stone of the Big House, the lawn grass and the field grass. We looked for the ghost of the Monkey Puzzle tree and came as close as we could, over electric fences and pink picnic blankets, to the great spreading Cedar of Lebanon. Back then on the brink of a war rooted in European colonialism and remote public school biblical cartography, we thought about what the tree represented, we felt its rugged bark and looked up into the cathedral of its branches. Walking to the lake in silence through wet woods towards distant proud mournfulness of Paul Robeson singing. I dropped in the stories of the three intermarried enslaver white dynasties, the Gores, the Langtons and the multibarrelled Temples who once owned the estate, a direct thread of inherited wealth all the way to Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and the founding of the Royal Africa Company. Both institutions actively engaged in the trade in captured and enslaved African people, the latter established in 1660 by King Charles 2nd, whose descendant and namesake is currently on the throne and owns the Newton Park estate. We felt the cut letters of his name in the grey commemorative stone on the library wall and thought about the absence of memorialisation for those whose lives were destroyed by the Royal Africa Company.

On our return, beside the lake and enjoying the picturesque, as we stood before a tree planted in memory of lost trees and lost memories of the struggle for women’s right to vote. A closing question posed by a tree. Once, the other side of Bath, a hundred years ago, there was an arboretum, each tree planted by a suffragette recovering from imprisonment, forced feeding and hunger strike. Today that park at the rear of Eagle House is a housing estate. Once, at Newton Park, not so long ago, by the lake, this tree was planted to remember that erasure and commemorate the struggle. Today there is no orientation, no bench upon which to sit, to reflect on a social justice story and remember the price paid for the vote. I hope the group of walkers left with that story mnemonically linked to the tree by the lake, that they retell it and keep asking questions.

Out of cognitive dissonance on that short afternoon’s walk, quiet acknowledgements of the atrocities obscured by the picturesque emerged. Remembering through our senses, becoming story carriers I hope those walkers continue walking on, emboldened to ask ever more difficult questions. We offered respect to the memory of flesh, blood and water in Dabydeen’s inextricable link. The question of apology, offered and demanded, was in the air along with the hope and desire for repair. We ended with a brisk climb up from the lake on time and hungry for the promised cream tea, ready to ask questions on the origins of the fruit, sugar and cream. It was four o’clock, tea time!

But the cream teas were done for the day

Two ghostly white men in white wigs and frock coats drifted past.

and it was left to me to make the apologies.