C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 27 LAURENCE WESTGAPH Built on slavery English Heritage is revising its listings to highlight the role that slavery and the slave trade played in creating many of Britain’s most important buildings, not least in Liverpool. ‘Beyond a doubt it was the slave trade that raised Liverpool from a struggling port to be one of the richest and most prosperous trading centres in the world,’ wrote the Liverpool historian, Ramsay Muir . Many of the merchants involved in this trade used their newfound wealth to adorn the town with fine new buildings. These merchants usually had various business interests as very few focused on just one avenue of wealth accumulation. The lack of detailed accounts and the fact that money acquired in one trade was used to invest in others make it impossible to disentangle the proceeds of slavery from wealth accrued from other sources. In the brief examples below I have focused on those individuals who were known to have significant interests in slaving. A number of Liverpool’s finest buildings were erected to house cultural institutions. Some were founded or supported by merchants who had made fortunes in the slave trade, and still survive. Thomas Harrison’s Grade II listed Lyceum Club (1802), which housed the Liverpool Library, was financed in part by men who had profited from the exploitation of enslaved Africans.The Grade II listed Royal Institution building (1799), still standing on Colquitt Street, was built as the home of Thomas Parr, a Liverpool slaver.The Royal Institution, established for ‘the promotion of Literature, Science, and the Arts’, is considered the forerunner of Liverpool University. Many of the men who had helped establish the institution had links to slavery, either as former slave traders or owners of West Indian plantations that used slave labour. The Blue Coat Hospital for the Indigent Poor, a school for destitute children, was founded in 1708 by Bryan Blundell and the Reverend Robert Stythe. Blundell provided finance for the school from his income as a merchant and sea captain, while Stythe looked after the day-to-day running of the institution. Blundell was involved in carrying Virginian tobacco to England and also transported ‘refuse slaves’ from captivity on Caribbean sugar plantations to less labourintensive work on the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake. Blundell left the sea on the death of The Royal Institution, Liverpool Liverpool Town Hall
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