By Dr Jessica Moody and Dr Zakiya McKenzie
At the beginning of July, the Plants, Enslavement and Public History project team welcomed our RISE (Re-Interpreting Sites of Enslavement) partners to a warm and sunny Bristol for our first in-person meeting of the project. We hosted delegates from heritage trusts in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Canada, Nigeria and the United States. We ran a host of activities and valued the opportunity to meet and discuss themes and ideas for the project over the next few years.
Dyrham Park Visit
On day one, the group visited Dyrham Park, National Trust. Dyrham is a 17th-century country house in South Gloucestershire, near Bath. The visit included a garden tour and a house tour. The group discussed some practicalities around managing historic sites in the morning and in the afternoon we discussed the new developments in interpretation. Dyrham Park has particularly strong historical connections to Jamaica and Barbados, and a highlight of the visit was viewing the painting A View of the Port of Bridgetown, Barbados newly back from conservation and thought to be one of the earliest paintings of Barbados. Dyrham Park on Hidden Treasures | National Trust.
University of Bristol Workshop
The second day was a workshop at the University of Bristol. Members of the Plants, Enslavement and Public History project team delivered short presentations introducing ourselves, the project and its themes. RISE delegates each shared a ‘plant story’ connected to their sites, revealing connections to histories of enslavement through trade in spices (Zanzibar), courtyard gardens in merchant houses (Bermuda), expertise of enslaved people in growing for food and medicine as well as the romanticisation of plantation landscapes (United States), the significance of the breadfruit tree (Cayman Islands), botanical gardens (Barbados), gated herbal gardens (Nigeria), indigenous knowledge and food growing (Jamaica), and planting as a way of forging European leisure landscapes on African islands (Sierra Leone).
Trees recurred within our discussion as a common point of reference. They were sources of food introduced from other parts of the world through the colonial project (Breadfruit) but they could also be sites of memory, signifiers in a landscape for meetings or ceremonies, or as sites of trauma, used within punishment and violence. They could be romanticised as a way of sanitising a site shaped by enslavement as in the case of Oak trees with hanging Spanish Moss, lining avenues in the American South. Some trees had sacred and folkloric connections such as the Cotton Tree (or Silk Cotton Tree) in Jamaica which is thought to be haunted, with few willing to cut them down because of the potential spiritual consequences.
Together we discussed methodological approaches, archives and sources, and the challenges and limitations in different geographical contexts. We explored some ideas around different public history approaches and interpretation, and potentially some methods that could be tested across the next few years.
At lunch we ate some wonderful Jamaican food from Agnes Spencer catering and were treated to an impromptu poetry performance from the fantastic Miles Chambers, former city poet of Bristol (and now also caterer).
Society for Caribbean Studies Conference
On Wednesday, our group delivered a roundtable plenary discussion as part of the Society for Caribbean Studies conference which took place at the Wills conference suite, University of Bristol. Our panel, chaired by Zakiya and Jessica, included Christina Murray (Barbados National Trust), Charlotte Andrews (Bermuda National Trust), Lorna Bailey (Jamaica National Heritage Trust), Francis Momoh (Monuments and Relics Commission, Sierra Leone) and Elon Cook Lee (National Trust for Historic Preservation, USA). Our RISE delegates introduced themselves and their sites, and we then had a discussion based on a series of questions from the chairs including around the potential of exploring and communicating histories of enslavement through plants and green spaces, the extent to which public history work could be reparative, and how sites were engaging wider communities in their work. We then opened up for around 20 minutes of engaging questions from the audience.
Bristol City Centre
Some of our group peeled off from the conference to take a short tour of Bristol city centre. Starting on Queen’s Road outside the University of Bristol’s Wills Memorial Building, the group of heritage workers traced the city’s port history as we made our way down to the waterfront. A stop at Pero’s Bridge in Bristol Harbour (named after Pero Jones, an enslaved Nevisian man brought to Bristol in 1783 to serve the Pinney family) offered a striking example of how the city’s landscape holds understated connections to enslavement and mercantile legacies.
We continued to the empty plinth that once held the statue of Edward Colston, pausing to reflect on Bristol’s role as a key English port in Britain’s Atlantic trade and the ongoing public conversations about how histories of enslavement are remembered and contested in public spaces. We wrapped up in Broadmead, taking in a selection of street art, other monuments and statues and local shops before returning to the conference.
The walk provided a valuable chance for participants to see, first-hand, how stories of plants, people and places intertwine in Bristol’s urban environment. It sparked conversations that carried back into our wider discussions on how sites across the RISE network might approach histories of enslavement in their own contexts.
It was a fully packed few days and it was great to meet everyone in person and share productive and meaningful conversations about the research going forward!