Our urban and rural landscapes are intertwined with the history of colonialism. We must confront this legacy with honesty

‘Just how do we deal with the heritage of elite and beautiful buildings, cities and landscapes, or any work of art, which are the result of these historic Caribbean slave-based economies?’ asks historian Jeremy Musson in his review of my recent book A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape.

It is a question I very much asked myself 20 years ago, when – newly-resident in the multi-cultural London borough of Hackney – I first embarked on the PhD research that formed the book’s foundation.

As Musson reflects, ‘It is a very tough one to resolve, but how the heritage sector does its best by this “bittersweet heritage” is an important and testing question for all our shared futures…’ And I would whole-heartedly agree.

Of course, unlike statues or objects in a museum, historic buildings, whole towns and landscapes cannot be repatriated, removed or re-displayed. They can, however, be contextualised.

Indeed, historic buildings and landscapes are a fantastic and accessible way of engaging people with complex, international cultural histories and identities that are, in reality, over the generations, intertwined.

During a period of more than 300 years of colonialism and empire, much of Britain’s history happened overseas. In order, therefore, to truly understand a great deal of our built heritage from the 18^th, 19^th and early-20^th centuries, it is not enough to think local.

Examining and communicating how wealth from slave plantations fundamentally reshaped Britain’s historical geography needs nuanced discourse

You need, of course, to know about the brilliant inventions, the architects and designers, the masons and carpenters, the stone quarries and woods. But you must also examine patrons and international structures of historic political power, commerce and trade.

And, sometimes, this can be an uncomfortable process.

Over recent years, museums located in prominent 18^th century Atlantic trading ports - London, Bristol Liverpool, Lancaster, Whitehaven and Glasgow - have done an excellent job in showing how the products of colonial slave plantations, predominantly sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton, contributed to their expansion.

But riches from the Caribbean, in particular, were also invested in the rural hinterlands of these bustling ports. And, as a Bittersweet Heritage demonstrates, over time this influx of plantation wealth had a profound effect on the west of Britain through the construction of country houses, landscape gardens and new turnpike roads.

The profits of slavery, indeed, were instrumental in transforming poor, remote communities in Wales, the North West of England and Western Scotland into fashionable 18^th century tourist destinations: the Wye Valley, Snowdonia, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

Examining and communicating how wealth from slave plantations fundamentally reshaped Britain’s historical geography needs nuanced discourse, a far cry from some of the headlines in recent years. But, for the sake of future generations, this debate – underpinned by academically-rigorous archive research and historical analysis, of course – is essential.

It is for this reason, for example, that I have been trying to contact the current owners of a long derelict country house, Piercefield Park, on the Welsh borders, in the Wye Valley near Chepstow. The cliffside walks at Piercefield, fashioned by an absentee Antiguan plantation owner Valentine Morris in the 1750s were namely one of the earliest, most spectacular and influential visual legacies of this trans-Atlantic trade.

The rolling parkland, cliff walks – and the dramatic views along their riverside route – became part of a three-day excursion that attracted thousands of visitors from the spa resorts of Bath and Bristol Hot Wells across the Severn by ferry and along newly turnpiked roads.

The 23 carefully-curated ‘prospects’ of farmland, woods, castle, cave and river were painted by eminent artists such as Thomas Hearne and JMW Turner; chronicled in William Gilpin’s tour guide, Observations on the Picturesque; and immortalised in Wordsworth’s famous poem, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

In the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, the trip to Piercefield and the river valley beyond became so popular that – in an allusion to the aristocratic continental Grand Tour – it was known as the Wye Tour.

The influence of visits there on the aesthetic appreciation of ‘natural scenery’ was huge, not only in Britain, but internationally too, affecting the way that ‘sublime and picturesque’ landscapes in the Caribbean, Virginia and other American  states, as well as later British colonies, were perceived and recorded.

Several years ago, many of the paths and prospects at Piercefield were restored and are again publicly accessible, along a short – and beautiful – walk from Chepstow, with its railway station, tiny museum, and racecourse, with easy links to Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newport, Swansea and the towns and villages between. 

Yet few outside the immediate area are aware of Piercefield’s international historical and artistic significance. The current owners are generous benefactors to educational charities, and I am wondering if it might be possible to form a foundation to repair the mansion and re-amalgamate it with the cliffside walks, as a ‘centre of understanding’. It could link with Chepstow’s museum and others beyond to tell Piercefield’s important, global, story.

Piercefield perhaps could play its own part in showing how beautiful buildings and landscapes can be used to explore difficult histories in a sensitive manner, addressing a diverse range of communities, both urban and rural. I can imagine, for instance, the stables converted to holiday accommodation, so that city-dwellers might appreciate the spectacular beauty of the Wye Valley, while learning more of its history.

And why not a restaurant celebrating the flavours of both Caribbean Creole cooking and food from the Wye, grown in the estate’s restored walled vegetable garden? Piercefield could once again be one of Britain’s foremost tourist sites, as it was in the late 18^th century. But this time the whole story would be told.

>> Also read: A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape by Victoria Perry

>> Also read: We need to address the prejudice and exploitation that underpin our national myths