1) Background and context

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1.1 City context

Bristol is a modern, diverse city which has experienced a 10.3% growth in its population between 2011 and 2021, well above the national average of 6.6%¹. There has been a higher-than-average rise in the number of people in Bristol who claim an identity not related to the UK, rising from 9.8% to 12.4%². According to 2021 census data, 81% of Bristol’s population are White, 6.6% of the population are Asian, 5.9% are Black and 4.5% are Mixed heritage³.

Although many of Bristol’s residents experience a high standard of living, there is a significant disparity in opportunity between different Bristol communities and geographies. A 2017 Runnymede Trust report examining multiple data sets including exam grades, employment and job prospects found that Bristol was the seventh worst out of 348 districts in the country on the ‘Index of multiple inequality’, and the worst performing major city.

The city’s historical relationship to the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people, its subsequent abolition and the contemporary legacies of slavery are the subject of ongoing debate. Many of Bristol’s modern institutions benefited from the slave trade, either directly in the receipt of property, bequests and philanthropic donations from individuals engaged in trafficking, or indirectly where such donations originated from individuals or organisations that were made wealthy by the slave trade without actively participating.

In recent years, significant debate focusing on the ongoing memorialisation of historical figures such as Edward Colston, major protagonist in the slave trade and Bristol philanthropist, has taken place. In 1996 Bristol’s Festival of the Sea event, organised to celebrate John Cabot’s voyage to the Americas, was publicly criticised for failing to acknowledge the city’s involvement in the Transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. In 2017, public engagement was launched to consider the naming of Colston Hall, which was renamed Bristol Beacon in 2021, and in 2018 Colston’s Primary School was renamed to Cotham Gardens Primary School.

Debate about the University’s building names was also occurring at this time. In 2017 the University received a petition originating from the student body seeking a name change of the Wills Memorial Building which received 706 signatures⁴. Weeks later the University received a counterpetition containing 894 signatures,⁵ which sought the retention of the name. More recent work by the University of Bristol to examine its own connections to, and legacies of, the Transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans was precipitated following the events of 7 June 2020 in which a Black Lives Matter / All Black Lives Bristol protest of the murder of George Floyd in the US, led to the toppling and then sinking of a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol’s harbour.

1.2 Other institutions’ processes of renaming

In the period that followed the Colston statue toppling, many UK local authorities, universities and other institutions commenced examinations into their own links with the slave trade and how these connections came to be memorialised in building names, statues, coats of arms and other symbols of heritage. The processes used by public bodies to manage public engagement and inform decision-making varied and National Guidance for Public Bodies Reviewing Contested Heritage⁶, was commissioned by the Bristol History Commission and published in 2021 to guide institutions in undertaking this work.

Both in the UK and internationally, academic institutions including Montana State University, Brown, and the Universities of Glasgow, Cambridge and Oxford have been engaged in this process of reckoning with their historical links, in a range of contexts and with varying outcomes. Yale University’s 2016 guidelines on renaming have been influential in guiding other universities’ renaming policies, including the University of Bristol’s, which is included in section 2.3. below. Yale’s policy contends that renaming on the basis of values should be an ‘exceptional event’ due in part to concerns of historical erasure, but accepted that renaming might be considered where the legacy of the individual is at odds with the mission and values of the university or impedes the formation of community. A similar ‘principles-driven’ renaming exercise took place in New York in 2017 and a description of this is included in Appendix 6.1 as a case study.

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