Britain's biggest slaving port carried around 1.5 million Africans. The museum is shut until about 2029, but the city itself still tells the story, if you know where to look.
Liverpool knows exactly what it was. In 1999 the city council formally apologised for Liverpool's role in the transatlantic slave trade, and every year on 23 August the city marks Slavery Remembrance Day on the waterfront. In 2007 it opened the International Slavery Museum as part of its national museums. Few cities in Europe have faced their history this openly.
And yet a visitor walking from Lime Street to the Royal Albert Dock today could spend a whole day in Liverpool without meeting that history once. The museum is closed for rebuilding, the street names carry no explanation, and the most powerful building of the slave-trade era, the Town Hall, is admired for its architecture rather than for what is carved on it.
This page tells you what Liverpool did, what you can see right now while the museum is shut, and where its ships went on the coast of Africa.
The gap between the people carried and the people landed is the Middle Passage. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children taken onto Liverpool ships died before they reached the Caribbean.
Liverpool was a latecomer. London's Royal African Company had held the monopoly until 1698, and Bristol had a head start. But Liverpool had cheaper labour, ship-owners willing to cut costs, and a hinterland that made the goods Africa traders wanted: textiles from Lancashire and Manchester, metal goods and guns from the Midlands, salt from Cheshire. Its ships sailed around the north of Ireland, which was safer in wartime than the Channel.
Liverpool ships traded along the whole West African coast: the Windward and Gold Coasts in today's Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra around Bonny and Calabar in Nigeria, and Angola. Most of the people they bought were sold in the British Caribbean, Jamaica above all, and before American independence also in Virginia and the Carolinas.
The investors were not a shady fringe. They were the city's leading men: merchants, bankers, aldermen and mayors. Many voyages were split into shares, so that shopkeepers and craftsmen could take a small part of the profit. John Newton, who later wrote the hymn Amazing Grace and became an abolitionist, sailed on Liverpool slave ships as a crewman and captain.
It was also a Liverpool ship, the Brookes, whose plan became the most famous image of the abolition campaign: a diagram, published in 1788, showing hundreds of Africans packed side by side in the hold like cargo. The image that helped end the trade came from the port that profited most from it.
Abolition of the trade in 1807 did not end Liverpool's dependence on slavery. For another half century its docks handled cotton grown by enslaved people in the American South, feeding the mills of Lancashire. During the American Civil War, the Confederate raider CSS Alabama was built across the river at Birkenhead.
The International Slavery Museum opened on 23 August 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, on the third floor of the Maritime Museum at the Royal Albert Dock. It never had its own front door.
That is now changing, and it means the museum is closed. Both the International Slavery Museum and the Maritime Museum shut in January 2025 for a £58 million redevelopment. The plan turns the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Building on the dock into the museum's own entrance, with a new pavilion facing the waterfront, and makes the museum home to a National Centre for Teaching Black History. Reopening is currently expected in 2029; earlier estimates said 2028, and dates for projects of this size often slip.
This route covers about three kilometres in the business district and along the waterfront. Allow two to three hours.
Liverpool has one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its first known Black resident, a man named Abell, was buried in the city in 1717. Over the following two centuries Africans arrived as servants, sailors, students and traders, many of them through the shipping lines that linked Liverpool with West Africa long after the slave trade ended.
Kru sailors from the Liberian coast crewed the ships of the Elder Dempster line between Liverpool and West African ports, and some settled in the city. After the First World War, Black seamen and their families were attacked in the riots of 1919. The community around Liverpool 8 and Toxteth has shaped the city's music, politics and identity ever since.
Liverpool's ledgers list ports of purchase all along the West African coast. Many of those places can still be visited, and they give the numbers on this page a face.
Liverpool Lime Street has direct trains from London Euston in around two and a quarter hours, and frequent services from Manchester. From Lime Street, the Town Hall is about a 15-minute walk and the Royal Albert Dock about 20 minutes. Liverpool John Lennon Airport has flights from across Europe, and Manchester Airport, about an hour away by train, has long-haul connections. For routes from Africa, see flights from Africa to the UK.
A guided walk is the best way to read Liverpool's streets and buildings, and many tours combine the waterfront with the city's music history. 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 Liverpool overtook, Colston's statue and the story of Pero.
Where the guns traded for captives on the African coast were made.
The London monopoly that Liverpool's merchants broke.
How Britain paid slave owners when slavery ended.
Slave ports, soldiers, seamen and the road to independence.
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.