Podcast: Recognising Slavery’s History in City Regeneration

In this special episode marking 20 years of the Bartlett’s Sustainable Heritage MSc, we explore how cities can confront the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, the role of community-led projects, and how heritage can drive more inclusive and meaningful urban change.

Professor Kalliopi Fouseki is joined by Dr Helen Paul, Director of the Memorial of Enslavement and Freedom in Deptford and an economic historian at the University of Southampton, and Marie Xypaki, Head of Learning and Teaching Enhancement at SOAS.

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Transcript

Voiceover:
This is a podcast for the Bartlett Review, sharing new ideas and disruptive thinking for the built environment brought to you by the Bartlett faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. In this special episode, marking the 20th anniversary of the Bartlett Sustainable Heritage MSC Professor of Sustainable Heritage Management, Kalliopi Fouseki hosts a discussion highlighting the issues around heritage as it relates to the historic slave trade. 

Helen Paul:
So we can do something to maybe remove problematic statues, but adding insight is harder, I think.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
You don't need to have the objects to tell the history. You can do that through the stories, you can do that through images. You can do that through many, many more ways.

Marie Xypaki:
I believe that students themselves, they need to critically understand their own positionality, who they are and how they inform decisions as well as part of their practice.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Thanks for listening to this special episode, celebrating 20 years of our masters programme in sustainable heritage. This is part of the Institute of Sustainable Heritage 20 in 20 series with 20 stories shared over 20 weeks, and these stories are highlighting the people behind our teaching research and impact. The purpose of this episode today is to explore and unpack how heritage can be a powerful, but often very overlooked tool in creating more inclusive urban regeneration. And I'll do that through a conversation with two experts I have with me. One is the Director of the Memorial of Enslavement and Freedom in Deptford, and also an academic at the University of Southampton specialising in economic history. Helen Paul. I also have Marie Xypaki, who is the head of learning and teaching enhancement from SOAS with a very long, vast experience in participatory education and co-design education, especially in the context of historic urban environments. So we can start first maybe with Helen. It'll be really interesting to hear about your experience and the challenges that you may have been facing in your role as the Director of the Memorial of Enslavement and Freedom, especially taking into consideration the fact that there is lot of development projects that are happening at the moment in Deptford. It would be really interesting to find out how you see this initiative to embed enslavement, the history of enslavement into the urban context and make it more visible.



Helen Paul:
Thank you, Kalliopi. So the Memorial of Enslavement and Freedom, it's just called MOSAF for short, and basically MOSAF was put together because of a big development site called Convoys Wharf, which takes up a huge area of the riverside and it happens to sit largely on what was the naval dockyard. And that has a huge number of connections to enslavement but also to abolitionism, and you really wouldn't tell that from the space. Deptford is a site of a major dockyard founded by Henry VIII, and it's opposite the Isle of Dogs. So Deptford is just up river a little bit from Greenwich and a lot of that is just destroyed for various reasons to do with the blitz, to do with World War I Zeppelin, damage to do with regenerations slum clearance and basically, the site goes from being a dockyard to being a foreign cattle market to being a storage site for paper, for newspapers to just being an empty development site called Convoys Wharf.

Convoys, as it's now known, is just a massive site bang on the riverside that cuts historic Deptford into two and blocks people's access to the river as well. So London is the first slave port. It's not Bristol or Liverpool, it's the first port to get involved in Britain's transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. It's also a bit of river that is connected to Equiano who's a major abolitionist. He was there and he was enslaved at that point. And the yard itself, the Royal Naval Dockyard provides the convoy ships that help to convoy the slaving ships and it also provides some of the ships that later on form the West Africa squadron that's supposed to suppress the trade. So it's very much enmeshed with whole enslavement economy. So one of the big problems is simply a stalled development site taking up a really key location with no public access and around that therefore you don't get tourism, you don't get people just visiting the area and you don't have a space to put up things like information boards or any kind of memorial.

Our original plan had been really to have a site on that space to create a kind of museum. But I think we've moved on from that because one of the challenges is if you set up a museum, it's expensive, you need objects and a lot of the objects that you might want actually no longer exist. So the ships themselves that were used in the trade or to convoy slaving ships or to stop slaving ships, those ships really don't exist anymore. The warehouses, most of the warehouses, something to do with that don't exist anymore. And the number of objects that we have is basically zero that we hold. So we have a lot of challenges in terms of a traditional museum and that's why we've moved to being simply a memorial. Anything at this stage would be an improvement on that empty ground. The empty lot of Convoys Wharf.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Sounds really interesting. It reminds me of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade back in 2007 when there were a lot of museum initiatives and a lot of exhibitions on the history of enslavement and a lot of the museums mentioned at the time the challenge of finding the objects to display the history, but however, that at the same time became a trigger to shift our idea about what a museum is and a museum will have moved beyond the idea of a museum as a permanent physical structure that displays specific physical object, but it can be something more fluid, maybe more embedded into the wider urban scale into the wider community. And the objects are actually the stories and the memories of different people from the past but also from the recent present.

Helen Paul:
Well, for us, we've now moved to advocacy education and doing historical walks so people can come on those walks. But what we find from volunteers as well is that they might come from Deptford and have no understanding, no prior knowledge of this because it was basically not foregrounded in their education. We've worked with a local school to provide educational materials to them to help them educate children, but we've also had various meetings with the Convoys Wharf people to try to steer them away from an alternative history, which is about naming everything after Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, who are the two probably main figures resident in that area. You also get things named after. So Francis Drake, and these are people come from the heart of that enslavement complex who are problematic figures in many ways and trying to get people to move on from them is important too.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
That sounds interesting. Maybe a last question before moving to Marie to ask specific questions about the education aspect. You mentioned that you have been trying to engage with the Convoys Wharf people. Does this imply the developers, the people who are in charge of the development of the site? And if that's the case, what has been the response? How do you think based on this example, developers could be interested or engaged in integrating alternative and inclusive stories and histories as part of the wider development project?

Helen Paul:
So Convoys Wharf, the people who are developing it have reached out to different groups to ask for opinions, to have some sort of feedback and how successful that is or how unsuccessful is really unclear until they actually start building. I think they're now being forced to have a riverfront walkway, which is good. And they were going to have a museum which apparently was dedicated to James Bond. They've shelved that idea, but quite what else they're going to do isn't clear. Ideally, we'd like something to make it clear how important that particular riverfront area is to enslavement history, but until they do something, we won't know how successful we've been in advocating for our case.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
That's very interesting. And the reason I have this interest in Deptford in particular is also because it's part of a significant case study for our students. So I'm teaching the Inclusive Urban Heritage module. The students are being asked to explore what is the significance, the heritage significance in the area, not just associated with the Convoys Wharf, but also with a wider area in Deptford including the town centre and other parts of Deptford. Given that Deptford is a multicultural place, there's a lot of new communities also arriving to the area. So the idea of that module is really to kind of encourage the students to come up with an interpretation, urban heritage interpretation strategy, which includes creative ways of presenting and representing different community groups. And I have to admit that they have been coming up with some brilliant ideas and drawing on different strategies like capturing the sounds, the smells, and not just the stories of course.

So more intangible dimensions of the historic urban environment, which can be very important, especially when telling an alternative history, a hidden history. This is why I have such a keen interest and thank you very much for being such a great collaborator as part of this project. And also it was a great delight to meet with Marie because Marie has been looking very much on co-designing education and educational activities with different groups beyond just the teaching staff. So including communities, including other stakeholders. And I'm wondering Marie, whether you could tell from your side of things, what are some of these challenges?

Marie Xypaki:
Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much, Kalliopi. It's lovely to be here today. I guess before I kind of go into the co-design side of things, I was hoping to frame a little bit what participatory practice in teaching, how can they look like? And I just wanted to say that it's pretty much extending your classroom outside to the community, outside to the real world as we say. So it is about actively involving students, staff and external partners such as community members, local authorities or practitioners. And they work all together in this learning process and altogether they produce knowledge outputs that ideally are beneficial also to the community themselves. So there are various kind of pedagogical framings around these participatory practises such as service learning, critical service learning, participatory action research, community-based research. And as you said, co-design can be one aspect, one type of activity that students can do together with partners. But before that, also students can do, I guess kind of simpler, let's say activities that involve a smaller engagement from the community. And we are talking about just simple knowledge sharing where community partners are invited as guest speakers or community partners introduce students in their community through a site visit, which I believe it's something you extensively do in your work. And very often we see students doing interviews with community members and then sharing these findings with the community organisers who can then pursue a specific goal for the community.

It's I guess a high level engagement and it needs a high level commitment and trust, and it's about centering often more marginalised voices in this process of co-design. Some examples can be co-designing research, co-designing the actual research questions communities and students gathering data together, interpreting findings. But it can be about, we see extensively in, for example, planning curricula, students running co-design workshops with community members. So co-designing is also very important when it comes to the role of the community in I guess deciding on the assessment brief because the assessment brief is pretty much the knowledge output that's going to be produced. So they have to be equal partners. Going back to this idea of power and how we make sure we shuffle that and make it equal because co-design is about dissolving this power hierarchies. And you asked me about the challenges and I would say the challenges lies, I guess there are a few practical challenges, which is the differing timelines, languages, expectations.

You cannot really do co-design in a 10 week module is about rethinking the curriculum a bit more or you can do part of that co-design process and make it clear which part of the process you're doing. But still we see extensively at The Bartlett where colleagues do co-design and it works really well both for the students and the community. Academic schedules, as we said, and learning outcomes don't align always with the pace of the community work or again, the unpredictability of urban development and it's a matter of managing expectations and having an open dialogue with your community partners.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Sorry for interrupting, you're saying so many interesting things. So before I forget, the community participation is something that we have also been doing beyond the teaching as part of our heritage work. I think my question would be; how, given the timeframes that we have both in teaching, but also when we implement the project, how can new communities motivate to dedicate the time needed? Obviously they have an interest and that's why they're involved, but in many occasions, it requires a lot of their time. And maybe this is a question for both of you to consider. What do we need to ensure that we engage with the communities in a fair way, in a way that is really respecting their time, their expertise as well, because they do bring a lot of expertise. So yeah, I don't know whether any reflections or any experiences from both of you would be very interesting. Any examples?

Marie Xypaki:
Thank you. Helen, if you don't mind, I'll give it a go and then join me please. I'm currently doing research at The Bartlett Curricula, so I'm reviewing all of the modules and I'm exploring the ones that have a community participation aspect. And I'm looking at, part of it is how do we engage our community partners? And it seems that there isn't one way. So for communities where there is a close relationship between the specific module and the community themselves, it seems that to build the trust, to build the connection, it's something that started far before the actual 10 weeks of the delivery as you know. And you are emphatically nodding Kalliopi and many modules, they do have a budget on the side as you said, to pay for the time of the community. There is another approach as well, and this is more in the co-design side of things, when the communities themselves approach UCL approach, a module leader asking for evidence and for a fancy policy report with a UCL logo, then what happens there is that often it's like a client-based approach and there is no funding for the community.

And it's quite interesting because often it's exactly the same process, exactly the same learnings, but I think it seems it's a weird power thing that we need to think about. There is no funding in that case because then the module leader, they feel like your need is central to my module and all the learnings around what you need. And I'm accommodating that. But it seems very clearly to me that the ethos of colleagues is to give money to the community and really give them the money their knowledge deserve, treating them as equals in the learning process.

Helen Paul:
And it's a tricky one because sometimes you are actually then dealing with the same community groups and the one that I'm in is in a much bigger space. Obviously in Deptford there are different community groups and then London more broadly, but I actually live in Southampton and there tends to be a gatekeeper figure in certain communities and that person can and sometimes does facilitate or hamper what you're trying to do even if there is some money behind it. So you can get stuck in various kinds of power play and it's very difficult to get around that if that is the community leader because the same person turns up umpteen different places. In Deptford, it's less problematic because you can go around them to find lots of different people. But I think as well, there's a question sometimes in the mind of the community itself is: are we being used to facilitate a kind of PR campaign for a particular university that's maybe had some bad press? That can be a problem as well.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Absolutely. And the other thing that I'm thinking again, and it will be very interesting to give your experience and reflections is especially in the context of urban development, urban regeneration, there are multiple stakeholders. For example, in Deptford of course there are the multiple communities. You have the developers, you have those who are running businesses and they may have specific interests like attracting more tourists potentially. But also you have the local businesses, so you have multiple, of course you have the more heritage cultural initiatives like in this case the memorial of enslavement and freedom. And of course all the stakeholders have different interests which are very often in conflict with each other. So when we co-design like in the context of participation and co-creation and co-development, how do we go about it given that there are multiple stakeholders and what is our role both as educators or as facilitators of that process urban of inclusive and regeneration? And I find personally I find it very, very challenging.

Marie Xypaki:
I would say our job is to teach our students to hold the space, hold the space for the different stories to be heard, and then when they have these stories, make sure that they interpret also through their own kind of technical expertise, interpret these into as inclusive plans as possible. And I would be really keen to hear what Helen has to say about it, but I would say it is a skill that we need to teach our students.

Helen Paul:
Yes, I think sometimes there are big forces that we don't have control over. So for example, if you build a lot of luxury flats and people buy them as a hedge against risk, if there's a policy that says you can buy a luxury flat and leave it empty and you live abroad, if you can do things like that, there's not a lot we can do at the ground level. So some of that is beyond what a student could do. Maybe they need to be aware of these processes, but there's not a lot they can do about them. There's also the other issue about a movement of new people into an area and other people being feeling that they're going to be pushed out. So one of the issues in Deptford is if you build a whole lot of new housing on the site of Convoys Wharf, if you put in restaurants, bars and shops, is that going to drag business away from Deptford High Street and the Deptford market or is it going to strengthen it because it actually brings more tourists in and it's an extra thing to do? Should there be a riverboat stop there? So it can be that there are doom, mongers, it's hard to know in advance what the effect is actually going to be.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Yeah, absolutely. This is actually very interesting because it connects with another case study that we have as part of my other module on heritage management and sustainable development. And we even had a European project in that area, which is in Woolwich. We can learn from Woolwich. So with the new development, the Royal Arsenal development, which is very highly disconnected from the rest of Woolwich, from the traditional kind of town centre, there have been ongoing issues for many years. We have been going to that site for 14 years now. So I've seen the change, I've seen the transformation for the last 14 years and with the students we have been collecting data every single year. So we actually have a very good longitudinal understanding of the transformation of the place and what we see now, again, inevitably there is a sense of gentrification what a lot of the local business things are setting down. And the local businesses were actually the main character, the main component of the character of that high street. However, there are attempts to connect more the two sides at the moment because of all the frustration and the anger that has been going on for years.

Marie Xypaki:
And I'm wondering whether this is, again, going back to the importance of the participatory practices in teaching, this is why it's so important for students to actually collaborate with those directly affected by urban regeneration, to understand the lived realities, co produce knowledge and explore alternatives. And I would also say enable the students to understand the power systems behind these injustices as well and what is their own power and what is not.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Absolutely. That's a very good point. And maybe we don't do enough on that aspect possibly because of the very tight timelines that we have, but that's a very good point. So back in 2007, I had the opportunity to get involved as a researcher in a project to explore public perception of museum exhibitions across the uk, which were revolved around the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. It was very interesting because a lot of the museum exhibitions very much were a celebration of the abolition of the slave trade. And it was only in a very few instances that we had exhibitions which actually took a step beyond that. And they tried to talk about the very dark, traumatic associated history. So the London Museum of Docklands, there was a much more deep, level of engagement of the communities and they actually took on board writing the text themselves because one of the main challenges was their representation through the text.

A lot of the museums, they said, we don't have the objects and that's why we don't talk about these very dark aspects of enslavement because we don't have the objects to show them. We don't have the actual physical thing to demonstrate this. You don't need to have the objects to tell the history. You can do that through the stories, you can do that through images, you can do that through many, many more ways. And the community was very much empowered to write the text themselves. It was not an easy process. It was actually very challenging, but it was a very powerful process. And actually what I found interesting that was reflected also in the comments we received from the visitors. So in the cases where the museums took a more critical approach to not an approach of celebration but rather an approach to really showcase the complexity and the untold aspects of that history, the visitors were much more engaged, especially visitors who identified themselves of African Caribbean descent. On the contrary, in other museums, the level of engagement was much lower. So you could see that they were more passive because the exhibition didn't provoke this critical reflection. I don't know, Marie, if you want to add anything on that.

Marie Xypaki:
It makes me think even more about the importance of engaging with diverse voices in teaching. And I'm thinking about also what we talked about before, get students understand the power structures that pertain to the urban environment today like colonialism and neoliberalism. Because these power, these injustices imbalances, they do shape the urban environment and they do shape the way communities behave, but also their role of the practitioners. And very importantly, I believe that students themselves, they need to critically understand their own positionality, who they are and how they inform decisions as well as part of their practise. And if they're not aware of these power systems, if they haven't engaged with various practise and epistemologies as part of their studies, then I find difficult to think how can they be inclusive in their practise when they graduate? And we need the shift. I think it's clear we need the shift and I think maybe starting from the classroom and outside the classroom, the community is the first step or one of the key steps.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Helen?

Helen Paul:
Yes, I think it really depends as well who the community is in this case because sometimes the community can be completely wrong about something. Certainly when you move away from the urban areas into, as I've found in Hampshire villages, sometimes you get people who will celebrate certain histories and who are not interested at all in others and want to basically shut it down and they still have a vote. If you have a particular politicised environment of who gets to be a trustee of a big museum, who gets to be at that top level, that is also a problem because we had that under the last government. Somebody who was at the National Maritime Museum as one of the trustees was thrown off the board by government minister on the grounds that this person did research that was about decolonization. And this is where you get a backlash and you also get people using decolonisation efforts or hidden histories, attempts to reengage as a way to try to win votes from the far right.

So when Colston's statue was toppled, there were people who went in to see the statue who were pro Colston, and there was also politicians who ramped up their opposition to the statue being kept in a museum on its side covered in paint. They wanted it put back. So in terms of who is the community, that community also includes people who are pretty right wing and whose interest in responding to requests for help, for information, for consultation is also there. So at some point someone has to make a call as to what is going to happen to that statue or this museum or that name of that road and that becomes very difficult.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Absolutely. So I think what we can learn from other countries might be a question. And one of the first examples that comes to my mind is the case of Australia and how they have been dealing with indigenous communities both not only in terms of representation of indigenous communities, but also of active involvement of indigenous communities into the management co-decision making of managing archaeological sites, for example, museums, their own heritage, cultural landscapes. And it is actually Australia, it's much more advanced still. Definitely it was one of the first countries who advocated for this participatory approach to co-creation and co-design of interpretation of management of heritage. I dunno about your experiences, Helen.

Helen Paul:
My concern is a lot of the time with enslaved Africans, the sites of memory might well be in West Africa or other parts of Africa or else in the OR somewhere else like that. And then having that site on soil here becomes difficult. Where are you going to go to actually recognise what happened? So interestingly, there's going to be a new memorial in the West India docks replacing one of the statues that I think was torn down after the Colston statue was toppled. So we can do something to maybe remove problematic statues, but adding in sight or it's harder here, I think.

Marie Xypaki:
And from a pedagogical standpoint, I can say that in other countries, participatory practises in teaching are institutionalised. So it's a requirement in a higher education curriculum to have an element of community engagement in teaching. For example, there is a service learning framework in Europe at the European level and many different networks and funding and loads of support. And there is nothing like that in the UK. Quality assurance is very strong here as well, which poses differently, limited everywhere it should be. But I'm guess there are less flexibilities in the curriculum to work with communities in a meaningful way. And of course it can happen. That's something for another podcast and it's something that we can learn from.

Kalliopi Fouseki:
Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. I want to find out more maybe another podcast for that. I think we have covered a lot of interesting ground and we touched upon a lot of interesting issues. So thank you very much Helen and Marie for your time.

Marie Xypaki:
It was great being here today. Thank you for having us.

Helen Paul:
Yes, thank you indeed.