Ten community groups working across nine London boroughs have been awarded grants of up to £10,000 for projects examining the capital’s links to the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. The awards are intended to support public activities and local research that could help shape a future network of memorial markers.
The projects will take different forms, including guided walks, exhibitions, storytelling and research into places whose connections to slavery have been overlooked or insufficiently recorded. They are not awards for constructing new memorials now. Instead, the funded work is expected to identify potential locations and bring locally held histories into public view before decisions on any future markers are made.
Local histories at the centre
The selected organisations include groups based in Croydon, Camden, Hackney, Lambeth, Waltham Forest, Ealing and Deptford, alongside projects focused on the City of London and Soho. Their work ranges from an examination of the history surrounding 22 Soho Square to a project about Deptford Dockyard’s colonial past and the ways neighbouring African and Caribbean communities have understood and resisted its legacy.
In Camden, the funded programme will explore stories of legal challenge, resistance and abolition connected to the area. A Waltham Forest project will consider links between local history, empire, migration, Windrush and Black community heritage. In the Square Mile, five guided walks are planned to explore Black histories that have received less attention in public accounts of the area.
Those examples illustrate why the programme is structured around community research rather than a single account of the city. The aim is to connect local evidence, memories and interpretation with a shared understanding of a history that reached far beyond one neighbourhood. The projects are required to complete their work by March 2028.
A proposed network, not finished monuments
The grants sit alongside The Wake, a planned central memorial at West India Quay in Docklands. Planning permission has been granted for the nearly seven-metre bronze cowrie-shell sculpture, which is intended to honour enslaved Africans who were trafficked through the transatlantic trade and their descendants. Permission allows the project to move forward, but it does not mean the work has already been installed.
The wider Sites of Memory programme envisages smaller markers connected to that central memorial. Their locations have not been selected. Research by the ten funded groups is expected to help identify suitable places, while the final design and delivery of any markers will remain future stages of the programme. The announcement should therefore not be read as confirmation that memorials will be built in every borough represented by a grant.
London’s part in organising and financing the trafficking of enslaved people is reflected in buildings, streets and accumulated wealth across the capital, yet remembrance in public space has often focused elsewhere. The new awards create a route for residents and community organisations to investigate that uneven record through their own local histories, rather than treating the subject solely as a distant national story.
Funding for the programme is provided through the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Over the coming months, the immediate public outcomes will be the research and activities led by the selected groups. Any permanent network of markers will depend on the findings of that work and on later decisions about sites, design and delivery.
