The fourth-largest slaving port in Britain, and the first to put up a memorial to the people it sold. Where to see Lancaster's hidden history.
Ask people in Britain to name the country's slave-trading ports and they will say Liverpool, Bristol and London. Hardly anyone says Lancaster. Yet this small, handsome city on the River Lune was the fourth-largest slaving port in Britain, and its elegant Georgian quayside, its custom house and its famous furniture were all built on that trade.
Lancaster has only started to talk about this in the last twenty years. Today it has a quayside memorial, a museum gallery, a lonely grave on the shore of Morecambe Bay and a group of local historians who are tracing the families on both sides of the trade. This page shows you where to find them.
Many Lancaster merchants also traded directly with the Caribbean and North America, bringing back sugar, rum, cotton, tobacco and mahogany grown or cut by enslaved people. Smaller neighbours such as Preston and Ulverston followed Lancaster into the trade.
St George's Quay was the heart of Georgian Lancaster's trade. Walk along it today and you still see the tall stone warehouses, some with their old hoists and pulleys for lifting goods from the ships. Merchants like Dodshon Foster had their houses and warehouses right here.
The finest building on the quay is the old Custom House of 1764, where shipowners paid their duties. It was designed by Richard Gillow, of the famous furniture-making family, who had himself been to Barbados in 1753. Since 1985 it has housed the Lancaster Maritime Museum, which has a permanent display on the city's part in the transatlantic slave trade and on the families who grew rich from it.
In 2005 Lancaster unveiled Captured Africans on St George's Quay, near the Millennium Bridge. It was the first memorial to the victims of the slave trade at a British port, and it came out of a local arts and education project called STAMP, the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project.
The sculpture was created by the Black British artist Kevin Dalton-Johnson. It is built of stone, steel and coloured blocks, with a sail that carries the numbers of enslaved Africans on board the ships that sailed from the city. It was taken apart, cleaned and repaired in 2025, so it is in better shape now than it has been for years.
Lancaster's best-known export was not a ship but a chair. Gillows of Lancaster and London made some of the finest furniture in Georgian Britain, and they made it from mahogany cut in the forests of the Caribbean and Central America, largely by enslaved people, and shipped into St George's Quay. The Gillow family also held shares in at least one slaving ship, the Gambia, in the 1750s.
The best collection of Gillows furniture is in the Judges' Lodgings, the oldest town house in Lancaster, on Church Street below the castle. Its gallery Gillows of Lancaster and London: A Global Story now tells the whole chain, from the woodcutters in the Caribbean to the sailors, apprentices and cabinet-makers in Lancaster. Through the Facing the Past project the museum also hangs new portraits of Black people who lived in Georgian Lancaster, including people who escaped from slavery here, painted by the artist Lela Harris from records in the archives.
Larger ships could not sail up the Lune to Lancaster, so they unloaded at Sunderland Point, a tiny village at the mouth of the river. Around 1736 a young African arrived there from the West Indies as the servant, almost certainly enslaved, of a ship's captain. He died within days. Because he had not been baptised, he was buried not in a churchyard but in a field at the edge of the shore.
Nobody recorded his real name. He is known only as "Sambo", a name forced on him by others. Sixty years later, in 1796, a plaque with a poem was added to the grave. Since then the grave has become a place of pilgrimage. Local children still leave painted stones and flowers on it, and a low stone wall now protects it.
Much of the new work in Lancaster comes from the city itself. The Lancaster Black History Group, the two universities, Lancaster Priory church and the Judges' Lodgings work together on Facing the Past, which researches the families who profited and the Africans and Caribbean people who lived in Lancaster. Their Slavery Family Trees project traces the descendants on both sides.
The memorials to the slave traders are still there too. In St John's Church a memorial honours John Lowther, part-owner of the last Lancaster-owned slave ship, the Johns. The fine monuments in the Priory record merchants whose wealth came from the West India trade. Lancaster has chosen to explain them rather than remove them.
All the city-centre sites are within a gentle hour's walk of each other.
Lancaster's ships traded mainly on the Upper Guinea coast, from the Gambia River down to Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast. Those places have their own memorials:
Lancaster is on the West Coast Main Line between London and Glasgow, with direct trains from London Euston, Manchester and Manchester Airport. The station sits right below the castle, so you can walk to every site in the city centre. For Sunderland Point you need a car, a bike or a taxi.
Lancaster is a good stop between Manchester or Liverpool and the Lake District, which starts less than an hour to the north. 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 giant to the south that overtook every other port.
Colston, the docks and the story of Pero.
The city that financed and insured the trade.
Sugar and slate in North Wales.
Lancashire's cotton, and the congress that planned Africa's freedom.
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:
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