Memoryscapes are both personal and shared, we each have a patchwork of memories of feelings, smells, sounds, encounters with creatures, places and plants that make a map of the world we inhabit. Memoryscapes are also corporate and institutional, manipulated by those in authority to generate particular narratives and to silence and disable others. My creative work, walking and asking questions, attends to both the personal and the institutional. In both respects the toppling statue of Edward Colston looms over the book Breaking the Dead Silence, the idea for the publication conceived in the immediate aftermath of the June 2020 events. Responding to an open call, nineteen diverse authors contributed: activists, academics, historians and heritage professionals. Each chapter explores, directly or indirectly, a response, commentary or experience in the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd and the renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide.

The title references Jane Austen’s description of ‘the dead silence’, a closed down conversation, a silence that is not allowed to become an argument, in which there is no fuel for contestation or any further sound of agreement or disagreement. At the time the events of 2020 appeared to shatter the prevailing silence on white supremacism and the legacies of chattel slavery and colonialism; a new richer, more honest, more open heritage narrative appeared to be emerging, even in Bath. Chapters in the book discuss some of those initiatives in the changing memoryscape. My own chapter, however, with a first draft completed in the autumn of that year became less optimistic, I recount my experience in Bath, from delivering a commissioned cycle of walks in Bath’s Sydney Gardens to a walk being cancelled.

As dust settled on the drying out statue lying in the dark of a Bristol museum warehouse I received a phone call withdrawing a commission for an intervention at the gala reopening of Sydney Gardens. I was informed that the content of the walk was  ‘inappropriate for such a celebratory event’. I reflected on how, once the lever of National Lottery funding is removed, Bath’s white parochial fragility returns and the pervasive silence rises up elegantly, discretely closing out the uncomfortable. Exhibitions disappear to become foot notes on websites, video links dropped, information sheets locked away. This was the case following the Lottery funded 2007 commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade exhibitions at The Holburne and at Beckford’s Tower; it remains to be seen if recent muted acknowledgements in the city will go the same way.

Despite the frisson that the toppling of the Colston Statue sent through the heritage institutions of Bath, acknowledgement or apology of any kind from these institutions has yet to find a permanent voice, least of all from the custodians of Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Acknowledgement and apology for chattel slavery and the other atrocities of colonialism are widely recognised as the first essential steps towards psychological, cultural and financial repair. Professor Olivette Otele wrote about ‘reluctant’ sites of memory: places whose custodians deny or obscure connections with a particular uncomfortable or contested past, where mourning and reflection is made difficult or acts of remembrance prevented.

Reluctant Sites of Memory are mirrors into our past and present. They are oblique but powerful reflections of our abilities to forget, remember and create knowledge despite social, cultural and economic impediments.  (Otele 2018)

Other academics have written about how these haunted and wounded places teem with unheard voices and stories. Over these past ten years as an artist-researcher, walking and asking questions I have learned about colonial exploitation, forced migration and looting, all hidden in plain sight in Bristol and Bath. From Bath’s UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and the old port of Bristol to the coastal cities of the UK and beyond, public sites of memory have yet to fully acknowledge the atrocities committed in the creation of the wealth they manifest.

In 2014 for the opening of Bath Spa University’s Commons building at Newton Park, I presented an installation using media gathered collaboratively on a walk between the old brassmill at Saltford and Clevedon Pools, Bath. The brassmills along the River Avon were, in many respects, the mint for the trade in West African people’s lives, producing, amongst other items, brass manillas, wearable wealth, the currency of the slave trade. The wealth generated through the labour of those enslaved is embodied in Bath where slaveowners came to play, network and bathe. Walking beside the river we made visceral, watery connections: water drove the mills that made the brass items, these items were transported via water, as were the enslaved Africans, water irrigated the sugar and it was water, hot and cold, that their enslavers enjoyed in Bath. Millions of Africans died in the long years of the TransAtlantic Traffic those forced onto the ships and became ill or resisted or both were thrown overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, flesh, bones and memory in the sea. Whether it is the rain that falls cool over Bath or that which seeps down to hot rocks to return as hot springs, that rain comes off the Atlantic.  As poet, Derek Walcott wrote, The Sea is History (2008)

Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed (2010) and others it is my view that to be part of the constructed amnesia and the forgetting of injustice is to become complicit in its persistence. Racism and its inverse, white supremacism, became structural through the TransAtlantic Traffic in Enslaved Africans and fundamental to European colonialism. My view, as a white man, is that without reaching back to and owning that past Britain remains shackled to it. Making a way, walking and asking questions, I attend to complicity, racialisation and white privilege; I seek to become more alert, this non-confrontational somatic approach is my way of sharing that becoming.

Together in those reluctant sites of memory, listening, sense-ing, asking questions with our whole bodies we find ways of hearing the unheard, of discovering and renewing the telling of forgotten stories. Our conversations often turn to the long lasting legacies of enslavement and colonial extraction and its fundamental impact on how we make sense of ourselves and the world.  Walkers disseminate this even if only as questions, for these individuals and for many others that includes urgent questions on offering and demanding apology.

Bath Spa University, as the heritage custodian of two if not three sites begging for an acknowledgement of the wealth they represent, has  much to consider. At Newton Park, standing on the shoulders of other labourers in the archive, I hosted a walk for Heritage Open Days in September. We were promised a cream tea at the end and although I had to up sell it, the potential juxtaposition was pregnant with possibilities for a delicious closing provocation. I opened the walk with David Dabydeen’s comment (2008) that there is an inextricable link between the English Country Estate and the Caribbean Plantation. We followed entangled threads to touch the stone of the Big House, the lawn grass and the field grass. We looked for the ghost of the Monkey Puzzle tree and came as close as we could, over electric fences and pink picnic blankets, to the great spreading Cedar of Lebanon. Back then on the brink of a war rooted in European colonialism and remote public school biblical cartography, we thought about what the tree represented, we felt its rugged bark and looked up into the cathedral of its branches. Walking to the lake in silence through wet woods towards distant proud mournfulness of Paul Robeson singing. I dropped in the stories of the three intermarried enslaver white dynasties, the Gores, the Langtons and the multibarrelled Temples who once owned the estate, a direct thread of inherited wealth all the way to Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and the founding of the Royal Africa Company. Both institutions actively engaged in the trade in captured and enslaved African people, the latter established in 1660 by King Charles 2nd, whose descendant and namesake is currently on the throne and owns the Newton Park estate. We felt the cut letters of his name in the grey commemorative stone on the library wall and thought about the absence of memorialisation for those whose lives were destroyed by the Royal Africa Company.

On our return, beside the lake and enjoying the picturesque, as we stood before a tree planted in memory of lost trees and lost memories of the struggle for women's right to vote. A closing question posed by a tree. Once, the other side of Bath, a hundred years ago, there was an arboretum, each tree planted by a suffragette recovering from imprisonment, forced feeding and hunger strike. Today that park at the rear of Eagle House is a housing estate. Once, at Newton Park, not so long ago, by the lake, this tree was planted to remember that erasure and commemorate the struggle. Today there is no orientation, no bench upon which to sit, to reflect on a social justice story and remember the price paid for the vote. I hope the group of walkers left with that story mnemonically linked to the tree by the lake, that they retell it and keep asking questions.

Out of cognitive dissonance on that short afternoon’s walk, quiet acknowledgements of the atrocities obscured by the picturesque emerged. Remembering through our senses, becoming story carriers I hope those walkers continue walking on, emboldened to ask ever more difficult questions. We offered respect to the memory of flesh, blood and water in Dabydeen’s inextricable link. The question of apology, offered and demanded, was in the air along with the hope and desire for repair. We ended with a brisk climb up from the lake on time and hungry for the promised cream tea, ready to ask questions on the origins of the fruit, sugar and cream. It was four o’clock, tea time!

But the cream teas were done for the day

Two ghostly white men in white wigs and frock coats drifted past.

and it was left to me to make the apologies.

Christina Horvath and myself will headline the Clevedon LitFest, Celebration of the Book, on Sat 2 November. I'll be hosting a conversation exploring the publication process, talking about our individual contributions and why we did it.  Do join us!
More details and tickets here

The book is available as a free download but if you would like to get your own hard copy at a significant discount the code is 27BREAKING , valid until the end of October from the publishers website:
Breaking the Dead Silence Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes.

Contributing a sound track made from walks in Sydney Gardens, Bath and the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide. Echoes and resonances of the work in South Australia last year beginning to seep into the work. Listen to the birds. The white settlers didnt like the sound of the indigeneous birds so they imported English song birds whilst exporting the bones of the indigenous people. Colonial extraction at its most brutal. Re-reading Fanon again.

A circular walk towards and through the site of the former Inglescombe Nursery (Wares) from Bath City Farm to From the Land and back. A memorable day. This write up has been a long time coming. Maybe because it took place on April Fools Day, No fools walking on this though! The report below is ghosted from an interview I gave for a colleague in the Research Office at Bath Spa University, many thanks for the hard work doing the write up.

Read the article here or scroll through below

Wednesday 22 February 2023 19.00-20.30 @ BRLSI Elwin Room
Colonial and Botanical Heritage in Two Spa Towns:
Bath in Britain and Bath in Jamaica. A talk by Dr Christina Horvath

This talk seeks to decrypt the colonial connections of two spa towns of the same name, Bath in Somerset, England, and Bath in the parish of St Thomas, Jamaica and explore how their environment and green spaces have been impacted by their shared colonial history. Bath in Somerset benefited from profit drawn from enslaved labour in sugar plantations in the Caribbean to create an attractive neo-Palladian cityscape with outstanding landscape architecture whose ‘universal value’ was recognized by UNESCO in 1987. Bath in Jamaica, in contrast, witnessed colonisation and anti-colonial struggle which resulted in the creation of spa facilities and a botanical garden but also in the destruction of some of the original botanical heritage as well as some of the built heritage. The comparison of both hot springs provides opportunities for a reflection on present-day inequalities within the heritage sector. 

The talk is free join in person in Bath(UK) or online. Register here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/colonial-and-botanical-heritages-in-two-spa-towns-tickets-462001126807

Botanical Encounters  8 March:
On the Resilience of the Dead Silence and the Crisis of Imagination

Wednesday 8th March 2023 19.00-20.30 @ BRLSI, Elwin Room
On the Resilience of the Dead Silence and the Crisis of Imagination: Walking and Asking Questions in Bath’s Sydney Gardens. A talk by Dr Richard White

In her 1814 novel, Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s offers a fictional account of how a conversation on slave-ownership was closed down through ‘dead silence’.  Between 2019 and 2021 Dr Richard White hosted a series of non-fictional walks, Botany Empire and Deep Time, traversing Sydney Gardens, where Austen famously once walked. The commission from the Lottery funded Sydney Gardens project generated three walking guides, numerous public walks and a performance at the Bath Tree-weekender in 2021.  In this presentation Richard will share some of the suppressed knowledges and unheard stories emerging from his work; he will discuss the reception of the walks in the context of the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol and Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage status. Two hundred years after the publication of Mansfield Park, the presentation asks the question, how resilient is the ‘dead silence’ and why should we care?

The talk is free to join in person in Bath(UK) or online. Register here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-the-resilience-of-the-dead-silence-and-the-crisis-of-imagination-tickets-462004015447

Botanical Encounters March 11: a walk
The following Saturday March 11 a walk is presented as a follow up to this presentation, the walk reprises one which was cancelled as unsuitable for the Gala Reopening of Sydney Gardens in 2022.
More details here

The walk is also free but places are strictly limited and registration is essential. Register here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-the-resilience-of-the-dead-silence-and-the-crisis-of-imagination-a-walk-tickets-462036051267


Talks and walks are presented as part of Botanical Encounters. The project aims to disentangle Bath’s often overlooked colonial legacies by looking at the impact of colonial voyages and conquest, imperial science, botanical and arts collections and the global displacement of plants and humans. More here

Tracing feral routes and ecologies
between the site of Ware’s Nursery and Bath City Farm;

Prospecting for local histories of growing;
Exploring the potential of regenerative farming.

A scoping and capacity building project November 2022 to April 2023 nurturing conversations and networks through the development and delivery of a public walk connecting across the Whiteway Road in Bath

Building on the creative and collaborative working practices of Blooming Whiteway and Bath City Farm and exploring the spectral presence of Ware’s Nurseries, Tulips and Tractors will explore local human and more-than-human networks, horticultural and agricultural histories and relationships with the land. The project contributes to a learning relationship with Bath Spa University towards funded activity sharing knowledge and building local resilience and capacity. 

Tulips and Tractors aims to

• Initiate and contribute to critical creative conversations on belonging, social justice and the land in a time of climate breakdown and cost of living crisis.

 

• Investigate processes and initiate activity gathering, imagining and articulating local non-human presences, feral routes through connected urban and urban fringe green spaces

 

• Initiate, build, extend and stimulate networks, communication and collaboration across both sides of the Whiteway Road towards further funded Knowledge Exchange activity. 

 

• Share and prototype participatory practices and approaches as part of a collaborative Knowledge Exchange project.

Activity:
Tulips and Tractors is focused on the development and delivery of a circular walk. An informal identification of possible wildlife pathways crossing human constructed boundaries will inform the route of a curated walk. Engagement is built through mapping, walking and asking questions, identifying connected green spaces and informal commons. Gathering stories, artwork, local memories and wildlife data will open conversations on place and belonging as well as issues of land use, land ownership, horticulture and agriculture. 

A boot from the installation which will be happening at Bath Jewish Burial Ground resonates with the Orwellian culture wars currently rumbling in the city. 

Sydney Gardens Gala…. a skirmish in the culture wars
On September 11 I was planning to split my day between setting up the Honouring Esther installation and hosting a couple of walks in Sydney Gardens, Bath. This was to have been a reprise of the work I completed last November on Botany, Empire and Deep Time. I was looking forward to another chance to use the blue tooth headset/‘silent disco’ kit that had worked so splendidly last year hosting a sound walking and questioning experience. It was to have been presented as a Victorian spectacle by the ‘gentleman Perambulist’ himself, weaving amid fancy-dress red coated dragoons and crowds of make-believe Jane Austens towards the lost grotto and back. Sadly within a few days of the invitation being made it was withdrawn and I was informed that certain unnamed ‘powers-that-be’ considered the content ‘inappropriate for a celebratory event’.

What had begun as an invitation to make a contribution to telling the stories of Sydney Gardens in an innovative way ends in the resurgence of the White silence. Sure, some of those stories are still uncomfortable for some people but I think they need to be heard. Evidently some people prefer an induced amnesia and wish the stories and the questions that arise to remain unheard.

We'll see what the Lottery evaluators make of that!

Their Only Crime Was Poverty
John Payne's booklet about the Bath Workhouse is now published
The booklet sets out the facts as in the Museum of Bath at Work exhibition of 2017 and traces the story through from before the 1834 Poor Law Act to the present St Martin’s Hospital. This was the exhibition that began the Workhouse Walks programme and my collaboration with John, leading on to the Walking the Names walks that we kept going through the lock downs.

‘Workhouse to Hospital’ is on sale at £5. Once printing costs are covered, income will go the Workhouse Burial Ground Campaign and used towards getting a permanent memorial to the 3182 people who died in the workhouse and are buried in unmarked graves there.

The booklet is 28 pages, printed on high quality paper, thanks to all who helped with this, especially Julian Vincent for typesetting, Jude Harris for designing the cover, and those who gave permission for the use of photos. On sale at Oldfield Park Bookshop in Moorland Road, BA2, and the Museum of Bath at Work and direct from the author

If you have visited the Burial Ground recently, you will know that Parks Department have changed their mowing pattern to allow wild flowers to grow. There are already interesting plants coming up. Paths have been mown to allow easier access for walkers.

Walking the Names continues supporting local residents in their opposition to plans to build housing right next to the Workhouse Chapel on Midford Road. The developer is refusing to recognise that 1107 bodies are buried there. These include John Plass, the stonemason, who was an inmate of the workhouse and supervised the building of the chapel, now a listed building.

price (£5) from Oldfield Park Bookshop in Moorland
Road BA2 or Museum of Bath at Work BA1.