Slaver statue will be hidden and replaced in £300,000 plan
THE statue of slave trader Willam Beckford could be replaced and stored in a car park at a cost of £300,000 under plans to remove his monument.
Beckford, who owned plantations and up to 3,000 slaves in Jamaica, is honoured with a marble monument in the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall headquarters, where he was Lord Mayor in the 18th century. The Square Mile’s governing body feared a “political outcry” if no action was taken following Black Lives Matter protests, and in January the Policy and Resources Committee voted to remove the memorial and replace it with a less controversial work.
Beckford’s statue will be hidden in an underground car park after being removed under plans which will incur a £300,000 bill, according to documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph.
The City’s heritage experts advise “storage in the long-term could be in a specially created lock-up in the members’ car park”, adding that removing the likeness, which stands in the Guildhall’s Great Hall, would cost £50,000 due to the need for expert stonemasons to preserve its Grade I listed surroundings.
Replacing it “will be problematic”, the experts advised, because any new piece “should be of the same quality” in order to get planning permission.
The plans to swap one marble for another would cost a further £250,000, according to the heritage advisers. Surveyors suggest the statue could remain in the Guildhall in another location before being stowed, and the City’s Tackling Racism task force has suggested covering up such images in the interim. The plans follow a review by the task force, which was pushed through by Christopher Hayward, the Sheriff of London, over fears of a “political outcry” if no action was taken, despite him having “mixed feelings”.
Dr Zareer Masani, a Colonialism historian, said that removing it was a waste of money, adding: “If the City of London wants to atone for having benefited from past slavery, there are far more constructive ways of doing this, instead of wasting large funds on the tokenism of removing statues.”
“Public spaces belong to the public and not to self-appointed panels of socalled experts, reflecting fashions of the day.” The Corporation said that a working group would consider contested monuments, and “evaluate a wide range of options for addressing concerns relating to the statues of William Beckford and Sir John Cass in Guildhall”.
The group will report back in September with no action taken until then.