Cathedral launches QR code marketing campaign to elucidate hyperlinks to slavery
Visitors to a Church of England cathedral will be invited to use their mobile phones to learn about how its monuments are linked to slavery.
Gloucester Cathedral will place QR codes around the building, which can be scanned to provide explanations of how the people memorialised are linked to slavery.
It comes after the CofE announced it was establishing a £1billion fund to recognise that it once profited from the slave trade.
Gloucester Cathedral contains the tomb of Edward II along with memorials to more obscure figures whose stories will be researched as part of the new project, which is expected to be launched next month.
Leaflets will also be provided to inform visitors about the slave profiteering of prominent Gloucester locals with information and guidance sought from by a panel drawn from the ‘city’s diverse communities’.
Gloucester Cathedral will place QR codes around the building, which can be scanned to provide explanations of how the people memorialised are linked to slavery
It follows a city-wide review of so called ‘contested heritage’ carried out in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, which sought to identify monuments, statues and plaques in the city connected with the ‘Trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans’.
The cathedral said that the project would be conducted ‘in keeping with our principles of social justice’. So far six figures have been identified and research into their links is being reviewed.
The scheme may include James Henry Monk, the Bishop of Gloucester from 1836 to 1856 who was a supporter and patron of George Wilson Bridges, a rector in Jamaica who became a prominent anti-abolitionist.
A plaque in the cathedral also commemorates Admiral Henry Christian. He was identified in the council review of monuments but a subsequent review by the cathedral casts doubt on his inclusion.
He was said to have been involved in breaking a blockade of the slavery supporting Confederacy during the American Civil War. The new research said ‘proving or disproving Admiral Christian’s involvement is problematic’ – highlighting the difficulty in labelling figures from hundreds of years ago.
Christian was five years old when slavery was abolished and also served aboard a ship which carried out anti-slavery patrols in west Africa before he was posted to the Americas.
Canon Rebecca Lloyd said that the project ‘aims to shed light on the cathedral’s past through the research of the stories of those who are memorialised within the fabric of the cathedral’. She added that the cathedral was ‘committed to learning more about our building’s history and those who have formed it’.
Earlier this year, a QR code was added to a statue of Virginia Woolf to explain her ‘imperialist attitudes and offensive opinions’.
It is part of a scheme by Labour’s Camden council in London – drawn up in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests – to highlight connections to ‘racism, slavery and imperialism’.
The Cathedral said it welcomed input from members of the public.
