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London E2An £18.1m makeover of the Geffrye Museum updates its lively chronology of domestic interiors to show the messier side of home life, but the building’s slave trader statue remains…
You know the argument: removing statues of slave traders is “erasing history”, whereas retaining them in places of honour is not. Never mind that most of us, in the year since Edward Colston was pitched into Bristol harbour, have learned more about Britain and slavery than we ever knew before. And so the Museum of the Home, in Hackney, east London, still bears the statue of Robert Geffrye, a 17th-century merchant who grew rich on the destroyed lives of African slaves, but also endowed the former almshouses in which it is located.
The statue stands in the middle of the building’s handsome symmetrical elevation, high up, just beneath the pediment of its central chapel. It could have been taken somewhere else, where it might have been exhibited in such a way as genuinely to de-erase history. But although most of the respondents in a local consultation favoured its removal, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, demanded that the statue – which is a 20th-century replica rather than the original – should stay. Continue reading...