More than 2,000 slaving voyages, over half a million Africans, a statue in the harbour and a boy called Pero. What Bristol did, and where you can still see it.
Stand on the harbourside in Bristol on a summer evening and the city sells itself easily: bars in old warehouses, the SS Great Britain across the water, students on the cobbles, cranes kept as ornaments. Nothing in that picture tells you that for much of the eighteenth century this was one of the busiest slave-trading ports in the world, or that the money from it is still visible in the squares, churches and townhouses a few minutes' walk away.
For a long time Bristol preferred not to look. Its best-known merchant, Edward Colston, stood in bronze in the city centre for 125 years, praised as a philanthropist. Then, on 7 June 2020, protesters pulled him off his plinth and rolled him into the harbour. Since then Bristol has had to talk about its past in public, and the conversation is far from finished.
This page sets out what happened, who profited, and where you can still see it. It also follows the ships to the other end of the route: the coast of today's Ghana, Nigeria and The Gambia, where Bristol's trade began and ended in human lives.
Those numbers come from shipping records that merchants kept with great care, because every voyage was an investment. What the records rarely show are the deaths: people who died in the forts and holding pens on the African coast, on board during the crossing, or in the first months on the plantations. Those are counted in estimates, not ledgers.
A Bristol slaving voyage usually lasted about a year. Ships were fitted out in the city's own yards and loaded with goods made or traded locally: copper and brass ware, cloth, guns and gunpowder, spirits. Many tradesmen and manufacturers took their payment as a share in the voyage, so the profit was spread across the city. A single ship could have up to eight investors.
The ships sailed to the West African coast. Bristol traders bought people above all in the Bight of Biafra, at Bonny and Calabar in today's south-east Nigeria, and further south in Angola, but they also called at the Gold Coast and The Gambia. One Bristol ship, the Scipio, reached The Gambia in 1734 after 25 days at sea; another, the Amelia, needed 54 days in 1759 to reach Cape Coast, where Britain's own castle held captives for sale.
A ship could be packed with up to 600 people for the Middle Passage to the Caribbean. They were sold in St Kitts, Barbados, Nevis and above all Jamaica, or in Virginia on the American mainland, to work sugar and tobacco. The ships came home loaded with sugar, rum and tobacco, which fed Bristol's sugar refineries and warehouses, and the circle started again.
As Liverpool overtook Bristol from the 1740s, fewer slave ships left the Avon. But the city did not walk away from slavery. Its merchants simply moved into the direct trade with the plantation colonies, owning estates in the Caribbean, shipping their sugar and lending them money. When slavery itself was abolished in 1834, Bristol families were among those who claimed compensation from the government for the people they had owned.
Edward Colston was born in Bristol in 1636 and made his fortune in London. In 1680 he joined the Royal African Company, the London company that held the English monopoly on trade with Africa, and later served as its deputy governor. During his years in its leadership, the company is commonly estimated to have shipped around 84,000 Africans, of whom roughly 19,000 died on the voyages. Each captive was branded with the company's initials.
Colston gave large sums to Bristol: schools, almshouses, churches. For two centuries the city repaid him with his name on a concert hall, a tower, schools, streets and pubs. In 1895 it put up his statue in the city centre. Campaigners asked for it to be removed, or at least given an honest plaque, for decades. The wording of that plaque was argued over for years and never agreed.
On 7 June 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in the United States, the statue was pulled down and dumped in the harbour. Four people were charged with criminal damage. In January 2022 a Bristol jury acquitted them.
The name has since come off most of the city. Colston Hall reopened as the Bristol Beacon, Colston Tower became Beacon Tower, Colston's Girls' School is now Montpelier High, and the windows and dedications to him were removed from Bristol Cathedral and St Mary Redcliffe.
The statue itself was fished out of the harbour, cleaned and conserved, with the protest graffiti deliberately kept. After a public consultation in which around 80 per cent of the residents who responded said it belonged in a museum, it went on permanent display at M Shed in March 2024. It lies flat in a glass case, in a gallery about the history of protest in Bristol, next to the story of the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott.
The most personal story in Bristol is told in a tall townhouse at 7 Great George Street, just off Park Street. It was built around 1790 for John Pinney, a sugar merchant who owned the Mountravers plantation on the Caribbean island of Nevis.
In 1765 Pinney bought a twelve-year-old boy called Pero, together with his two younger sisters. When Pinney moved his family back to Bristol in 1784, he brought Pero with him as his personal servant, along with Fanny Coker, an enslaved woman who worked as a maid. Pero served Pinney for 32 years. He lived and died in Bristol, enslaved, in a city that liked to believe slavery happened somewhere else.
The house is now the Georgian House Museum, furnished as it would have looked in Pinney's day, from the grand rooms upstairs to the kitchen and servants' quarters below. A small exhibition tells Pero's story and the Pinney family's business. The footbridge across the harbour near M Shed is named Pero's Bridge in his memory: a rare case of a British city naming a landmark after an enslaved African.
Everything below is within about two kilometres and can be walked in two to three hours, including time inside M Shed and the Georgian House.
If you have more time, walk up to Clifton. Many of the handsome terraces there were built and lived in by families whose money came from West India estates, sugar and the slave trade.
Bristol's records list ships and investors; the other end of the route has names too. The Amelia was bound for Cape Coast, where captives were held in the dungeons beneath the castle before being rowed out to the ships. The forts on that coast, from Elmina to Accra, are still standing, and they are the most direct way to understand what a Bristol voyage meant for the people on board.
Bristol Temple Meads is the main station, with direct trains from London Paddington in under two hours and good links to Wales, the Midlands and the north. From Temple Meads it is about a 20-minute walk to the harbourside. Bristol Airport has flights from across Europe, and buses run into the centre. If you are flying in from Africa, most routes go through London; see flights from Africa to the UK.
Guided walks and day tours make it easy to combine Bristol with Bath, the Cotswolds or Wales. Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
The port that overtook Bristol and became the capital of the British slave trade.
The City that financed, insured and organised the trade.
The African writers and campaigners who fought the trade from London.
How sugar money built a castle in North Wales.
Slave ports, soldiers, seamen and the road to independence.
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