Welcome to this self-guided tour that explores the City of London’s economic connections to the transatlantic slave trade and slavery.

We hope you will immerse yourself in and contemplate the hidden legacies of your surroundings. If you have half an hour during your lunch break to spare, or perhaps after work, we recommend that you walk (physically or virtually) between each place in the order outlined in the interactive map below. However, if you’re pushed for time, please feel free to delve into whichever place piques your interest.

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Background information

Britain, while not the first slaving nation, became the biggest enslaver in the world after outmanoeuvring the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch by the late-17th century. The transatlantic slave trade as a whole led to the forced migration of at least 12 million people via the second leg of the ‘triangular trade’. Britain alone transported some 3.1 million Africans to its colonies, of which only 2.7 million survived.

The transatlantic slave trade was primarily an economic system that depended on flows of human and financial capital. This was underpinned by circles of credit, and guaranteed by the legal and political institutions of the time. As such, wealth derived from the slave trade contributed to solidifying the City of London as the global financial centre that it is today.

We have taken the City of London as a microcosm to explore the following question:

In what ways does London today reflect the economics of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery?

Current national memory depicts Britain as a benevolent emancipator who abolished the slave trade in 1807, the first to do so in Europe, followed by the abolition of slavery across most of the British Empire in 1833. This sentiment has become a cornerstone of British identity, as highlighted when David Cameron spoke on “British values” in 2013 and noted that

“Britain is an island that helped to abolish slavery”.

However, this undermines Britain’s deeper connections to the slave trade. From small, hidden coffee houses to huge institutions like the Bank of England, the vast array of material culture in the City today stands as a testament to the deep-rooted integration of the slave trade in Britain.

Ready to start your self-guided tour? Please make your way to Aldgate School before you ‘Start Exploring’ the map and select the ‘click here to find out more’ link that will take you to an article and audio transcript.

Each individual place has an article and audio file you can navigate to from the map, but you’ll also be able to move to the next place on the tour from the bottom of each page.

As you’ve made your way through this self-guided tour, we hope it has become clear how integrated the slave trade was in Britain’s economy and how its legacies are hidden in plain sight across the City today. While the slave trade had economic foundations, the “cost of slavery is more than merely money”: each place on this tour has shown that it also infiltrated into culture, politics and the legal system. Wealth derived from slavery contributed to the emergence of modern Britain and its legacies have permeated all aspects of British life, with enduring and serious ramifications. As you’ve seen, many institutions are currently contending with these legacies in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Britain must reckon with the uncomfortable truths about slavery that are woven into the fabric of many institutions in the City, and in London more broadly.

Therefore, to finish we would like to pose some questions for you to consider: 

• Is your firm linked to the slave trade (check here by searching the LBS database)? If so, do you think you ought to address this? How might you go about this? 
• Do you think the City of London is doing enough to confront its connection to the transatlantic slave trade? What more could they be doing?
• What do you think is the most appropriate way to address the complex legacy of the trade? Can reparative justice be done (e.g. CARICOM set out a 10 point reparations plan in 2014)? 

Please feel free to post your answers, or any general comments/questions you have below this post.

NEW FEATURE COMING SOON: we are currently in consultation with the City of London on the legalities of posting QR codes on each of the places on our tour – stay tuned for updates!