Liverpool is embarking on an ambitious project that aims to highlight the city’s infamous role in transatlantic slavery by transforming the Albert Dock Traffic Office into a new entrance pavilion for the International Slavery Museum (ISM). The renovation of the historic structure is just one feature of a £58m project that will delve deeply into Liverpool’s painful maritime past, making docklands a centre for the study of black history.
The once-thriving traffic office sat at the epicentre of Liverpool’s bustling world commerce during the height of the city’s slave trade. Additionally, the Canning Dock, situated nearby, will soon be opened to the public to expand awareness of the port’s lesser-known, deplorable history. It was a dry dock where ships that transported enslaved Africans to the Caribbean underwent maintenance and outfitting.
For decades, countless visitors to Liverpool’s waterfront have walked past the Canning Dock without any knowledge of its painful significance in human history. However, this year, construction work will begin on using the dock’s space to host an art structure and a contemplation area paying tribute to the presence of enslavement.
Liverpool, which holds the pivotal place in British transatlantic slave trade, with its merchants trafficking nearly 1.5 million people, became a highly significant city with the wealth and grandeur it derived from the profits of the slave trade. But it took years of grassroots efforts, allied with a tradition of trade unionism and left-wing activism, for Liverpool to begin acknowledging the human toll of its maritime past in the 1990s.
Michelle Charters, head of the International Slavery Museum, believes it is vital to highlight the brutal human history of transatlantic slavery, and the subject is central to the history of Liverpool’s maritime history. The redevelopment, which will receive funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, will give the museum its entrance for the first time and transform the history of the docklands for the present generation and future ones
Read the full article from The Guardian here: Read More
