Slave ports, plantation fortunes, African seamen and soldiers, and the students who planned independence in London. One history, told from both shores.
Most visitors meet Britain through its castles, cathedrals and country houses. Very few are told who paid for them. Between the 1660s and 1807, British ships carried more than three million Africans across the Atlantic. Bristol, Liverpool, London and Lancaster sent out the ships. Birmingham made the guns that were traded for captives on the West African coast. Manchester spun the cotton that enslaved people picked. Banks and insurers in the City of London financed and covered the voyages, and the profits were turned into town houses, estates and, in Wales, at least one castle.
That is only half the story. Africans have lived in Britain for more than 1,500 years: North African soldiers on Hadrian's Wall, writers and campaigners in Georgian London, seamen in Cardiff, Liverpool and South Shields, soldiers of two world wars, and the students who sat in London and Manchester planning the end of the empire. After 1948 came the nurses, drivers, traders and students whose families are part of Britain today.
This section follows those stories place by place, so you can stand where they happened. Every page also links back to the African side of the same history: the forts on the Gold Coast, the countries Britain ruled, and the people who fought for their independence.
Colston's statue went into the harbour in June 2020. The ships, the merchants, and the streets that still carry their names.
By the late 1700s Liverpool sent out more slaving voyages than any other British port. The museum on the Albert Dock, and what the waterfront leaves out.
The City financed, insured and organised the trade. West India Quay, the Docklands museum and the Royal African Company.
A small port with a large share of the trade, and the lonely grave at Sunderland Point.
Birmingham guns were traded on the West African coast for captives. The Gun Quarter and the city it built.
Mills fed by slave-grown cotton, and the same city that hosted the Pan-African Congress in 1945.
The London company behind Cape Coast Castle and James Fort, and the trade it ran from the coast of today's Ghana.
The Pennant family's Jamaican sugar estates and the Bethesda slate quarries paid for this castle in North Wales.
Harewood, Dyrham and many more: country houses built or bought with money from slavery and empire, and how to visit them with open eyes.
When slavery was abolished, Britain paid £20 million to slave owners and nothing to the people they had enslaved.
Roman baths, Georgian crescents, and the plantation fortunes behind part of the city.
Equiano, Cugoano and the Sons of Africa wrote and campaigned in London long before abolition became respectable.
Taken from the Fante coast as a boy and freed in London, he published one of the boldest attacks on slavery in 1787.
In 1787 London shipped its Black poor to Sierra Leone. How Freetown began, and what went wrong.
A Yoruba girl taken from Dahomey and presented to Queen Victoria, who became her godmother.
Butetown's sailors from West Africa, Somalia and Yemen, and the community they built by the docks.
After the First World War, Black and Arab seamen were attacked in Cardiff, Newport and Liverpool.
Kru sailors from the Liberian coast crewed the ships between Liverpool and West Africa, and some made Liverpool home.
Students, nurses, drivers and traders: the West African communities of modern Britain.
Brixton Market, Windrush Square and the national archive of Black British history.
Rome stationed a unit of "Aurelian Moors" from North Africa on Britain's northern frontier.
The Gold Coast Regiment and its comrades in Togoland, Cameroon and East Africa.
Tens of thousands of West Africans fought for Britain in Burma. Their story, and how little of it Britain remembers.
Free entry. Where to find the African and Caribbean soldiers' stories inside.
His London years, 1945 to 1947, before he went home to lead the Gold Coast to independence as Ghana.
Founded in London in 1925, its hostel trained a generation of West African nationalists.
Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Du Bois met in Manchester in October 1945 and set the course for the end of empire.
Britain's camps in Kenya, the hidden archives, and the settlement paid to Kenyan veterans in 2013.
What Britain took from Benin City, Kumasi and Magdala, and where it is today.
Free entry, millions of objects, and some of them taken by force.
Rubber, quinine and cocoa: how Kew moved plants around the empire.
Born in Denbigh in 1841, the workhouse boy who became King Leopold's man in the Congo.
Rhodes's money still funds Oxford scholarships. Who he was in southern Africa, and the fight over his statue at Oriel College.
From Egypt to the Cape, Britain ruled or controlled some twenty African territories. Start with the overview of every former British colony in Africa, or go straight to a country:
Coming over yourself? Read our guides to UK visas and entry from Africa, flights from Africa to the UK and your first time in London.
Britain Adventures is part of a network of independent sites on Africa and its history. These are the places where the stories on this page continue:
Search our Network. Start here.