Martin's Bank, Liverpool

There is a conspicuous lack of a sufficient memorial to the trade in Britain’s largest slave port, Liverpool. Here, for years, there had been no memorial to the slave trade’s victims. On the contrary, building after building proudly displays its slave lineage on its very richly frescoed outer walls. For instance, the Martin’s Bank building entrance is guarded by wall frescoes depicting African boys manacled at the feet and neck.

The only memorial that consciously seems to speak to the existence of slavery as anything but benign and natural is the homage to Nelson’s victories, which has manacled and chained figures at its base. These, however, have no direct relevance to the transatlantic slave trade as they are French prisoners of war. Caryl Phillips describes how "it is impossible to look at this fountain and its sculpture and not think of the slave trade", but such memorialisation is merely accidental.

The Merseyside Maritime Museum did seek to plug this amnesia in the city by inaugurating a small plaque at Albert Dock, which was unveiled by Bernie Grant MP in 1999. It depicts a ship and an African sculpture from the Slavery Gallery exhibit. It is tiny though, and dwarfed by the memorials to British imperial endeavour elsewhere on the waterfront. Even though I know it is there, I frequently walk past it unawares. Tony Tibbles, the curator of the Slavery Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, describes it as merely an "information plaque" and maintains it is not meant to have a memorial function. However, with no other specific memorial to the Trade on the waterfront in Liverpool it is forced to do the work of a memorial.

One instance of this is that the area around it is a focus for the annual slavery memorial day in August. Overall the plaque seems inadequate and token, particularly in contrast to the grandiloquent Titanic memorial further along the dock, which commemorates the hundreds of merchant marines killed in the disaster and in the subsequent world war. The death of thousands of white seamen in the trade as well as the millions of slaves displaced and killed surely demands recognition on a par with the loss of one (albeit legendary) ocean liner. Liverpool’s desire to forget its part in the trade is confirmed surely by an act of vandalism on the slavery plaque soon after it was unveiled in which the word "slave" in "slave ship" was erased. The vandal(s) by their choice of word to erase spoke up for a city still unable to speak comprehensively that unspeakable word and come to terms fully with its association with the city.

Alan Rice