After the fall, where?: Relocating the Colston statue in Bristol, from 2020 to imaginary futures

Abstract

Drawing on analysis of press reporting, museum display and a large-scale survey undertaken in Bristol in the aftermath of the 2020 toppling of the Colston statue, this article examines the shifting meanings given to the statue across a range of material and imagined sites. It works with two ways that history and geography intersect: the history of the sites/aftersites of this statue, and the materiality of histories in the sites/aftersites of this statue. Rather than the toppling of the Colston statue being a simple story of iconoclasm, a more complex historical geography was – and is – at play. As they imagined future aftersites for the Colston statue, people in the city saw this as an opportunity for some form of return of the statue – metaphorically if not materially – to one of its previous longer or shorter-lived homes. These former sites were seen to offer very different framings of the statue, as well as radically different ways of thinking about history. It is not simply historical geographers who are aware of the power of place in attributing meaning to statues. This can also be seen in popular responses to the afterlives, and aftersites, of the recent wave of fallen statues.