‘Counter memorials’ suggested for statues

‘There was a statue put next to the statue of one of the demonstrators. That might be a way of interpreting it’

STATUES of slave owners should not be torn down but have “counter memorials” placed alongside them, the head of Historic England has suggested.

Sir Laurie Magnus leads the charity responsible for listed monuments and has promoted a policy of retaining and explaining contested statues.

But the chairman suggested in an online conference that authorities could take a lead from the treatment of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, where a bust of one of the demonstrators who toppled it was briefly erected in place of the original sculpture.

Sir Laurie said this “artistic installation might help” and “would be a counter memorial” to reinterpret monuments that caused offence due to their connections to slavery and racism.

He said: “There are lots of ways to explain them. The one statue which has been removed, illegally, is the Colston statue. There was a 24-hour statue put next to the statue of one of the demonstrators who pulled it down. That might be a very good way of interpreting it.”

Sir Laurie’s suggestion during the Policy Exchange conference was backed by Oliver Dowden, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who said that the “counter memorials” could work if they were “done in a meaningful way and not a tokenistic way”.

He added that cultural institutions should not be “bullied” by “campaign groups or the zeitgeist of curatorial thought”, and warned against “misplaced idealism” making irrevocable changes in the cultural sector.

Sir Ian Blatchford, the Science Museum director, told the debate that while people believe “woke liberals have hijacked the National Trust” after the charity published its colonialism report, in reality changes are driven by “normal fellow citizens [who] are asking reasonable questions”.

He added: “The public is vastly more intelligent on all of this.”