Live from Bristol on the fifth anniversary of its Colston moment
By chance, we arrived in Bristol on the fifth anniversary of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue into the harbour.
Colston, a prominent Bristol merchant who played a plied the slave trade in the 17th century, became the focus of pent-up community fury about racial inequity during the trans-Atlantic blowback from the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
On June 7, 2020, the Colston statue put up by his grateful city in the centre of Bristol, was pulled down, dragged to the harbour and thrown in to wild cheers.
(The YouTube video is worth watching.)
To mark five years from that moment, we tracked Colston all the way to where he now lives: in the ‘Bristol people’ section of the M Shed museum near Prince Street.
And we pondered whether events around the Colston statue were a moment or a movement. More on that next.
In the meantime, here’s the plaque where the statue once stood. Right near Colston Avenue, a street that still bears his name. Here’s the forest of banners behind which Colston now reposes in the museum.
