Decolonising Gloucestershire's Landscape

Gloucester Docks:

Revealing a hidden Colonial Landscape and Waterscape

It was pouring February rain,

When I visited Gloucester Docks:

The Severn was swollen and turbid,

But the bell of the Atlas was silent

In the strengthening Severn wind;

The Atlas, a voyager to China and India -

For the East India Company,

The plaque told us on the warehouse wall -

But no mention of slavery, war or opium

(Standard East India Company practice),

Or the Stroudwater-East India Company nexus;

The Maritime Walk, as it is termed,

Takes you on past Phillpott’s Warehouse,

And the unmentioned Thomas Phillpotts:

Owner of some seven hundred enslaved people,

Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’

With Samuel Baker of Bakers Quay fame;

Samuel Baker of Lypiatt Park, near Stroud,

Paid £7,990 compensation

For 410 slaves in Jamaica.

The compensation paid to slave owners in 1834,

Is close to £17 billion in today’s values,

Fully forty per cent of the national budget back then,

The interest on which we have only just ceased paying –

This gives a hint to the bounty paid to Baker and Phillpotts,

A bounty that led to the development

of Baker’s Quay, and High Orchard,

The locus of Gloucester’s industrial revolution;

Now Gloucester Quays,

Where modernity and heritage coalesce,

And where plaques abound on warehouse walls,

But where there is no mention of the provenance

Of the money that paid for the initial development,

Where there is no mention

Of a hidden colonial landscape and waterscape.

When I got home, I contacted www.bakersquay.com

(‘Waterside luxury at its best’;

‘Founded on the spirit of affordable luxury’;

‘It is the final piece of the jigsaw in the regeneration of the City’s Docks’),

To ask if it might be possible to put up a plaque,

To remember the source of Baker’s and Phillpott’s money,

And to connect Maritime Walk with the seas of the world,

To reveal a hidden colonial landscape and waterscape,

For that would be a fundamental piece

In the jigsaw of the history of the ‘City’s Docks’,

And only then would the jigsaw be fully complete,

With Maritime Walk and Heritage,

With Maritime Walk and History,

With Maritime Walk and the oceans of the world,

All fully interlocked together,

At Bakers Quay.

No reply.

By Stuart Butler