Edward Colston made his fortune trading enslaved Africans and spent part of it building schools and almshouses in Bristol. For over a century his statue stood in the city centre. On 7 June 2020, it was pulled down, thrown into the harbour, and Britain was forced to confront a question it had long avoided: who deserves to be commemorated in public space?

Who Was Edward Colston?

Edward Colston was born in Bristol in 1636, the son of a merchant family with strong trading connections in the city. He was educated in London and entered the world of commerce as a young man, trading in textiles, wine, sugar and other commodities through the established Atlantic networks of the seventeenth century. He never married and had no children. He died in 1721 at the age of eighty-four and left the bulk of his substantial fortune to charitable causes in Bristol — schools, almshouses, hospitals, churches. For the next two and a half centuries, his name was woven into the fabric of the city: Colston Hall, Colston’s School, Colston Street, Colston Avenue, the Colston Society.

He was, by the standards of nineteenth and early twentieth-century commemoration, a model civic benefactor. When his statue was erected in the centre of Bristol in 1895 — 174 years after his death — the inscription described him simply as “one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city.” What the inscription did not mention was how he had made the money he gave away.

The Royal African Company and the Slave Trade

Edward Colston’s wealth was built, in significant part, on the trafficking of enslaved African people across the Atlantic. From 1680 to 1692, he was a senior figure in the **Royal African Company** — at various points serving as its Deputy Governor — the company that held the monopoly on the English slave trade. During those years, the Royal African Company transported an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 enslaved Africans from the West African coast to plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Historians estimate that approximately 20,000 of those people — roughly one in five — died during the crossing. The dead were thrown overboard.

Colston was not a passive investor. He was actively involved in the management of the company during some of its most active years of slaving. He received dividends from the trade. He sat on committees that decided how the trade was conducted. By any reasonable measure, the fortune he later distributed to Bristol’s poor was built on the forced labour, suffering and deaths of enslaved African men, women and children.

This was not unknown in Bristol during his lifetime. The city’s prosperity was deeply entangled with the Atlantic trade, including the trade in enslaved people. Bristol was, alongside London and Liverpool, one of the three cities most responsible for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1698 and 1807, Bristol merchants organised over 2,000 slaving voyages, carrying an estimated 500,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.

The Statue and Its History

The statue of Edward Colston that stood in Colston Avenue in central Bristol was erected in 1895, commissioned by the Colston Society — a charitable organisation that had been perpetuating his memory since the eighteenth century. It was the work of the sculptor John Cassidy. The inscription read: “Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city.”

By the time the statue was put up, Colston’s connection to the slave trade was not secret — it was simply not considered relevant to the commemoration. The Victorian and Edwardian cult of civic philanthropy celebrated the giving of wealth, not the means by which it had been acquired. Colston’s schools, almshouses and charitable endowments were real and had benefited many people. His role in the slave trade was treated as a historical footnote, or not mentioned at all.

The campaign to add a more accurate description to the plaque, or to contextualise the statue in some way, had been going on for **decades** before 2020. In the 1990s and 2000s, Bristol City Council, the Society of Merchant Venturers (which had close historical ties to Colston), and local community groups debated whether to add a new inscription acknowledging his role in the slave trade. Proposals were drafted and rejected. The debates went in circles. The statue remained unchanged.

7 June 2020: The Statue Comes Down

On 25 May 2020, **George Floyd**, a Black American man, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes. The killing, filmed and shared worldwide, sparked a global wave of protest under the banner of the **Black Lives Matter** movement. In Britain, tens of thousands of people took to the streets.

On **7 June 2020**, a large Black Lives Matter demonstration was held in Bristol. During the protest, a group of demonstrators — using ropes — pulled the statue of Edward Colston from its plinth. It was dragged through the streets and thrown into the harbour of Bristol’s floating dock, very close to the site where enslaved Africans had been loaded onto ships centuries earlier. The moment was captured on video and shared across the world.

Within days, the statue was retrieved by Bristol City Council from the harbour and taken into storage. It is now displayed in the **M Shed museum** in Bristol, laid on its side, with the placards and messages left by protesters around it, as part of an exhibition about the controversy.

Four people were subsequently charged with criminal damage in connection with the toppling: **Jake Skuse**, **Sage Willoughby**, **Milo Ponsford** and **Rhian Graham**. At trial in January 2022, all four were **acquitted by a jury**. The jury accepted that the statue — by commemorating a slave trader without accurate acknowledgement of his role — was itself capable of being considered grossly offensive, and that its removal could be justified under human rights law. The acquittals provoked their own controversy.

The Arguments for Removal

Those who supported the toppling, or who had long argued for the statue’s removal, made several distinct arguments:

**The statue was a form of ongoing harm.** For Black Bristolians, and for descendants of the enslaved, passing a statue that celebrated a man who had traded in the bodies of their ancestors was not a neutral civic experience. It was a daily assertion that the city prioritised the memory of a slave trader over the feelings of those whose families were most directly affected by his actions. No equivalent prominence was given to the memory of his victims.

**Colston’s philanthropy does not cancel his crimes.** The argument that Colston’s charitable giving redeems or contextualises his role in the slave trade was rejected by those who saw it as morally incoherent. The money he gave was derived from the sale of human beings. To celebrate the gift without acknowledging its source was, in this view, to launder the crime.

**The statue was not ancient history.** It was erected in 1895 — not in the seventeenth century when Colston lived, but two centuries later, as a deliberate act of civic commemoration that chose to remember him uncritically. The people who put it up made a choice. The city could make a different choice.

**The legitimate process had failed.** Activists pointed out that the campaign to change the statue’s inscription had been ongoing for at least twenty years, through proper democratic channels, without result. The Society of Merchant Venturers had repeatedly blocked or watered down proposals for more accurate contextualisation. The argument that the statue should have been removed “properly” was undermined, in their view, by the fact that the proper process had been tried and had failed repeatedly.

**Public art is not neutral.** Statues in public spaces are not history lessons. They are statements of civic values — decisions made by communities about who and what they wish to honour. Colston’s statue was not in a museum with contextual information. It was a figurative monument on a public street, casting him in the role of civic hero. Removing it did not erase history; it changed a value judgement.

The Arguments Against Removal — or Against the Method

Those who objected to the toppling, or who believed the statue should have remained (or at minimum been removed through official channels), made equally serious arguments:

**The rule of law.** For many people, the most important objection was not about Colston specifically but about the precedent of a crowd taking it upon itself to remove public property through direct action. Even those who acknowledged Colston’s role in the slave trade argued that a democracy must process these decisions through democratic institutions, not through the actions of whoever turns up at a protest with a rope. The acquittal of the four defendants, in this view, set a dangerous precedent.

**Who decides which statues fall?** The removal of Colston’s statue raised an immediate question: if this one, why not others? Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, Queen Victoria — all have connections to empire, colonialism, or policies now widely regarded as abhorrent. If a crowd can decide to topple a statue, where does it end? Defenders of the statue (or of the method of its removal) argued that a principled distinction between acceptable and unacceptable targets was not easy to draw, and that mob action was not the right way to try.

**Loss of historical education.** Some argued that Colston’s statue, whatever its faults, was a focal point for debate and education about Bristol’s history of slavery. Its presence in the city centre forced people to confront questions about how the city had been built. Its removal — particularly in the manner it was removed — might allow people to forget that history rather than be prompted to examine it.

**Bristol’s heritage and civic identity.** For some Bristolians, especially those connected to the institutions that bore Colston’s name, the statue represented the city’s long history and the endurance of civic traditions. Their attachment was not to the slave trade but to the sense of civic continuity the statue represented. Many of these people supported adding contextual information to the plaque rather than full removal, and felt that the dramatic nature of the toppling made a more nuanced conversation impossible.

**Anger at the political context.** Some of those who were angered by the toppling did not defend Colston personally but objected to what they saw as the appropriation of legitimate grievance about racism by a political movement they distrusted. For some conservatives, the events of 7 June 2020 represented a form of cultural revolution that they believed threatened democratic norms and historical memory more broadly.

**The acquittals were contested.** The jury’s decision to acquit the four defendants provoked genuine anger among lawyers, politicians and members of the public who argued that the verdict — in effect, that the statue’s content justified its destruction — was legally and politically wrong, that it created a troubling standard for vigilante action, and that it undermined faith in the criminal justice system.

What Happened Next

After the toppling, Bristol was left with an empty plinth. For a time, a statue of the activist **Jen Reid** — who had been photographed with her fist raised on the empty plinth the day after the toppling — was placed there without permission by the sculptor Marc Quinn. Bristol City Council removed it within twenty-four hours.

Bristol City Council subsequently announced a public consultation on what should replace the statue or what should happen to the plinth. The process proved slow and contested. By 2025, no permanent replacement had been installed.

The statue itself is now in the M Shed museum, laid flat, surrounded by the protest placards that were placed around it in the days after the toppling. The museum’s exhibition treats the controversy directly, presenting the statue as an object that tells a complex and painful story — about Colston, about the slave trade, about Bristol, and about how societies choose to remember their history.

Colston’s name continues to be removed from Bristol institutions. Colston Hall, the city’s main concert venue, was renamed **Bristol Beacon**. Colston’s Primary School became **Cotham Gardens Primary**. The process of renaming has itself been contested, with some former pupils and supporters of the institutions arguing that names are severed from their history over time and that the renaming erases rather than confronts the past.

A Broader Reckoning

The Colston affair was, in miniature, a debate about how Britain deals with the history of empire and the slave trade — a history that is woven into the fabric of the country’s cities, institutions and wealth, and that has never been fully acknowledged or taught.

In that sense, both sides of the argument were responding to a real problem. Those who pulled the statue down were right that something had gone wrong — that a civic culture that commemorated Colston without contextualising his role in the slave trade had failed the people most affected by that history. Those who were troubled by the method were right that democratic societies need processes for these decisions, and that direct action sets precedents that are hard to control.

What the Colston debate made undeniable was this: Britain has a great deal of history that it has not yet found a way to look at honestly. The statue lying in a museum in Bristol — prone, surrounded by placards — is an image of that unresolved reckoning. It is not, in any sense, a conclusion.

Key Sources and Further Reading

• Richardson, D. (ed.) (1996): *Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America* (4 vols.), Bristol Record Society — the definitive scholarly account of Bristol’s role in the slave trade
• Dresser, M. and Giles, G. (2000): *Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery*, Bristol Museums — catalogue of the museum exhibition examining the city’s slave trade connections
• Dresser, M. (2016): *Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port*, Redcliffe Press
• Olusoga, D. (2016): *Black and British: A Forgotten History*, Macmillan — Chapter 4 covers the Royal African Company and Colston’s role
• The National Archives — Royal African Company records: T70 series
• Fryer, P. (1984): *Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain*, Pluto Press
• *The Guardian* coverage of the Colston trial and acquittals, January 2022
• M Shed Museum, Bristol: mshed.org — the permanent exhibition displaying the toppled statue