Friends explore slavery and the City
London Quakers join Six in the City guided walk
Friends in London took part in a walk around the capital last month aimed at deepening their understanding of the capital’s links to slavery. A small group of Quakers joined the Slavery and the City walk; they were brought together by London Quakers and led by the group Six in the City on 3 November.
Fred Ashmore, from Kingston and Wandsworth Meeting, told the Friend the excursion was ‘fascinating’. ‘We wandered round the heart of the Square Mile, starting near St Paul’s where we remembered the unholy memory of the Church of England’s slave-worked sugar plantations in Barbados; [and] dropped into the Guildhall square for a discussion of the critically important trial which established that “owners” may not kidnap a free black person and transport him or her to the West Indies.’
The walk also took in the former meeting place of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade on Old Jewry, in which Friends played an important role, and the nearby printing works which helped spread the campaign around Britain.
‘The final stop was a modern and very striking sculpture ‘Gilt of Cain’ in Fen Court off Fenchurch Street,’ said Fred Ashmore.
‘It commemorates the vital linkage between the the financial accumulation which powered the City of London and the slave trade, whose residues in place names and public works still pollute cityscapes all over Britain.’
