Slavery and the City | Guildhall & the Zong massacre | Episode 2

[Music] You're listening to Slavery and the City, a three-part series brought to you by the Open City podcast. This series is about Britain's role in the Transatlantic slave trade and its legacy embodied in the city of London. [Music] The biggest gathering London has seen in weeks and one of the most passionate. [Music] These are difficult histories and indeed particularly when power indeed unfinanous makes. So you cannot separate racism in capitalism. One does not emerge without you. Through an in-depth examination of three key buildings in the capital, this series attempts to uncover Britain's role within the Black Diaspora. How it profited directly and indirectly from the trading of slaves and questions how architecture continues to convey cultural and social power in 2021. In episode one, we defined the themes of empire and colonialism. We examined how London and the global north benefited from these inherently racist mechanisms. In this episode, we're examining London's Guild Hall in relation to the Zong massacre and put in collective amnesia on trial. Through conversations with an expert on the slave trade and a Rhodes Must-Fall campaigner, our question how society's process guilt and our seek answers as to how we begin to move forward. It didn't come to light because 103 murders had taken place. The judge made it clear in the Guild Hall. This was a case about property, not about human beings. When I was involved in Rhodes Must-Fall in 2015, when this was one of the first kind of early iteration of these kinds of movements, it struck a nerve that I didn't know was so raw. I'm Celassie Setifur and this is slavery and the city. We're going to start this episode with a story that was heard in London's Guild Hall back in 1783. Sat right in the heart of the capital, the Guild Hall has been home to the City of London Corporation for 800 years and has welcomed guests through its imposing neogothic facade for 600 of those years. The building is made of great halls, galleries and the largest surviving medieval crypt in London. The Guild Hall's architecture was designed to reflect the power and prestige of London and its leaders. Here the merchant class held court. They created laws and regulations that generated and protected London's wealth. Countless infamous trials have been heard here for literally hundreds of years. But critically for us, the trial of the Zong Massacre took place here in 1783. So great were the consequences of this trial. It entirely reinvented Britain's narrative in relation to the slave trade. No longer would Britain see herself as holding the rightful whip hand over an enslaved race of Africans. Britain now saw herself as their benevolent savior. I'm joined by fellow cohost of the Open City podcast, Zoe Cave, to begin unpacking this tragic event. The Zong was the name of a slave ship that left the coast of Africa on 6 September 1781 with 470 slaves. There was so much money to be made at the time from the slave trade that many captains took more slaves than their ships could accommodate in order to maximize profit. The Zong's captain, Luke Collingwood, overloaded his ship with slaves and within two months of embarking many of them had begun to die from disease and malnutrition. The Zong then sailed in an area in the mid-Atlantic known as the Doldrums, or the Middle Passage, a risky area known for long periods of little or no wind. As the Zong became stranded there, sickness caused the deaths of seven of the 17 crew members and over 50 slaves. Increasingly desperate, captain Collingwood decided to jettison some of the cargo in order to save the ship and provide the ship owners with the opportunity to claim for the loss on their insurance. Over the next week, the remaining crew members threw 132 slaves who were sick and dying over the side. Another tense slaves threw themselves overboard in what Collingwood later described as an act of defiance. Upon the Zong's arrival in Jamaica, James Greggson, the ship's owner, filed an insurance claim for the financial loss that was caused by the loss of valuable cargo. Greggson had argued that the Zong did not have enough water to sustain both crew and the human commodities. The insurance underwriters disputed the claim citing that the Zong had 420 gallons of water aboard when she was infantryed in Jamaica. Despite this, the Jamaican court in 1782 was found in favour of the owners. The insurers went on to appeal the case in the Great Hall in the Guild Hall in 1783, and in the process provoked a great deal of public interest and the attention of great people. The attention of great Britain's abolitionists. The leading abolitionist at the time, Granville Sharp, used the deaths of the slaves to increase public awareness about the slave trade and further the anti-slave trade cause. It was he who first used the word 'matica'. For me, these kinds of atrocities really speak to how slavers and traders saw black people. There was absolutely no regard for the fact that black people were people. Human beings whose lives mattered as much as anyone else's. People who were mothers, fathers and daughters. People who were intelligent, had ambition, hopes and dreams. We often speak of slaves being the property of their owners, but what these types of atrocities demonstrate is the fact that for no reason, other than the colour of their skin, black people were treated by white people as even less than property. The lives of black people could simply be thrown away. It's incredibly heartbreaking that this sentiment still rings true today. Let's go back to 1783. What happened next Zoe? Rather than arriving back to London and being trial for murder, the slave owner returned back to file an insurance claim for his loss of cargo and initially won the claim. The insurers appealed the slave's claim and by chance an abolitionist was at the hearing. The case was then picked up and used by the abolitionists to garner public sympathy and support the abolitionist's cause. The Zong massacre becomes known as a turning point in the abolitionist movement, which puts an end to the slave trade in 1807. But it wasn't until 1833 that the ownership of slaves was outlawed. Revisionist historians now look at the Zong as this highly emotional moment that was seized upon by abolitionists to tragically credit their cause. The final point to make on this is that the Zong massacre creates a new narrative of Britain, where the country starts to view itself as the saviours of the uncultured of the uncivilised nations. In some regards, it creates the moral justification for imperialism. The Zong massacre galvanises the abolitionist movement in Britain, but how does it contribute to these ideas of colonialised memory and collective amnesia that become a core part of Britain's identity? The ways in which the Zong massacre was represented and narrated by abolitionists tells us more about abolitionists than it does about the Zong massacre. That's the need to reprieve who I pulled up with over Zoom a few weeks ago. Hello, thank you. Yes, my name's Anita Reprecht. I'm a lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. And I teach on an interdisciplinary programme, but mostly in relation to history, history of empire, slavery and abolition. The Zong massacre was a very important story for abolitionists in the 1780s, who when they started campaigning against the slave trade, were really intent and their big task really was to gather information about the slave trade and to disseminate it to a public. For abolitionists, it kind of represented or became a way of speaking about African captives as victims of callus and evil and monstrous slave traders. And so it was a powerful, emotive story that could be kind of disseminated in order to garner people's sympathy, who perhaps wouldn't have sympathy for Africans who they had knew very little about. So as a form of colonised memory, what we can say is that that story that was told and retold of disaster, of catastrophe, of victims, of passive, silent, nameless victims, and callus and evil traders, it was a story that rendered the fact that in fact, Captain Africans resisted their enslavement, their capture, their transport every step of the way. It rendered that kind of invisible, the idea that this was struggle as opposed to kind of victimage, if you like, and pure suffering. It enabled abolitionists to portray captives through this benevolent and paternalistic kind of way that captives need rescuing. So in that sense it's an abolitionist narrative that works works very much in the services of an abolitionist agenda, which was a kind of a, you know, an emotive agenda. It was an agenda that very much saw captive Africans as innocent, pre-modern, you know, children, if you like, that needed to be saved. So it was on the one hand, it was an incredible movement against slavery in the slave trade, but it was represented through very much through white colonial eyes. Did the people of Britain who didn't stop consuming sugar and coffee not stop to consider how is this still happening if we've abolished slavery? And two, it's sort of in more direct correlation to our experience in sort of the 20th, 21st century, how this seems to ring true in the sort of humanitarian culture that we have and the sort of image of the white savior. Just going back to the kind of the construction of abolitionist memory, it's so very much wedded to the construction of the nation of British-ness itself. If we think about the place of the Zong in this longer history, you know, in the 1780s, the abolitionists were organised to campaign against the trade, not slavery itself, you know, abolitionists were a diverse bunch, but the elite kind of political wing of it, if you like, were very conservative evangelicals most of them who decided to campaign against the trade, but many of them, including William Wilfors, was ambivalent about ending slavery itself. And so in 1807, when the act to abolish the British slave trade is passed, that's the moment of this, you know, you said this making of kind of British abolitionist history, and you're absolutely right, Britain outlawed its own part in the trade then, but this is a kind of a, you know, it's not just a British enterprise, it's, you know, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the poor, you know, there are a whole range of other European countries involved. And so when Britain abolishes slavery in 1830, or finally in 1838, again, it's another moment of look we've done this first. But between 1807 and the the very ending of the last slave ships crossing Atlantic in the 1860s, another two million Africans were transported, and whether very few Britain's could be identified within what then came to be known as the illegal trade, financing, shipbuilding, the supplying of goods for West Africa, you know, the shipping back of cotton, certainly back to the story of the song. If we were to rephrase the story of the song, what can this story tell us about the financial and professionalised system Britain created? So talking about insurance, property, commodification. Well, I think it's a story which leads straight into to all of those things. And that's one way to start to undo it as a narrative. I mean one thing, I think even before that, is to ask, you know, we have so little information about the song, actually, a scrap of a court record. And so one of the things I think, plus to what is to say, why is that? Where and why do we find out about the song? It's through the abolitionist archive and through a scrap of legal history, which I think alerts us to how much we still don't know about the middle passage, that we can never access about the middle passage. So that's one kind of question. But, you know, coming back to what I was saying before, the story leads straight into the implication of slavery with the development of empire and capitalism. The slave trade was an economic system that was developed for profit by commodifying human lives. And the story, I think we can start to unpack this, to remember that the story only came to light because it was told in relation to a dispute over an insurance policy. It didn't come to light because it came to court because 103 murders had taken place. The judge made it clear in the court, in the guilt hall, that this was a case about property, not about human beings, when halfway through this appeal case that we do have some record of, because an abolitionist happened to be there taking some notes, that actually, that, you know, murder might have been an issue here, the judge just closed it down immediately and said, this is about the calculation of financial loss and who should pay for that loss. It's not about what actually happened in that sense to people in the Caribbean. So it tells us that there are commercial laws that have been developed to support the structures of the slave trade. It tells us that financial instruments, policies, designs specifically to cover captive peoples aboard ship from financial loss are in place. It tells us that ways of thinking, modes of racial calculation, if you like, are securely in place, to allow what happened that C2 have happened. That's not to say that Captain Collingwood wasn't guilty party here, a murderer, but he was operating within a set of highly developed structures that sanctioned his actions, whatever kind of moral conscience he didn't or did have or so. There are a set of economic and financial structures there that are born out of the financial revolution of the 18th century, which is in and of itself born out of the vast profits being accrued to the country from the slave trade and from colonialism. That remain in place today and that continue to extract profit from racialized lives today. If you go to the textbooks, the legal textbooks in the 18th century, then it's there and it's clear that slave traders demanded policies to cover what was seen to be and understood to be one of the most risky maritime ventures that you could engage in, one of the most lucrative, if successful, but also really dangerous and therefore carrying risks that therefore required some sort of underwriting to smooth the nerves, if you like, of those investing in this trade. It does answer it a little, although it then also triggers another question of if we've been existing in this sort of just accepting of what, whoever's making these moves to really determine what histories are sort of taken forward, what sort of ideologies are taken forward, what kind of key moves for Eurasia are sort of put forward. I guess it seems to me like, and I mean this may have happened in the past, but it seems to me like sort of now more than ever, there's real room potentially because of the fact that we're in an age of information and we're so globalising that access to that information, that we're in a new age of really questioning histories and doing that from a sort of moral questioning, more so than was ever sort of done before. I guess that brings me to the second part around the term decolonisation and how it moves from what you've described around intention and everything else. So the question is can memories be decolonised? To decolonise is a matter of really heated debate at the moment, not so much whether we should or not, which is a heated debate, but also what it actually means. There's a whole panoply of position in some relation to decolonising. It comes out of a very specific literature originally, Latin American literature, and it's now come to be used to stand for a variety of ways of approaching the questions that you just asked before. So I hesitate to say decolonising is this. In relation to what you were just saying before though, about how we're living in an ever-more kind of informed world and a globalising world, with so much more access to information about what went on in the past, particularly in terms of empire and enslavement and the ways in which that hasn't been a matter of public history or memory in Britain. What I would want to do there is to say, on the one hand, we have more information and facts, but I also think what's needed and what is happening is the changing approach to the questions that you ask of those facts and information. So in a sense, I could say to you no empire and imperialism and colonisation and enslavement, have always been contested and I think that's something that is perhaps sometimes missed out of contemporary assessments at the moment of whether empire was all this or all that. you know there has been particularly from the late 19th century and was a really powerful anti-war. colonial movement. We're not taught about anti-colonial resistance. In terms of the memory of slavery in this country, it is largely being forged by abolitionist memory, Britain remembering slavery, and so far as it remembers publicly that it abolished slavery. And that does work in order to raise or invisible eyes the long prehistory of Britain's involvement in enslavement and colonization, as well as kind of producing a narrative of humanitarian overcoming and redemption and the moral high ground then Britain takes onwards into its later history of imperialism. So when we're suggesting that that history needs decolonising what we can do there is to say, well that means then that we need to engage in a more rigorous and critical study of empire and that everyone has the right to be able to learn how to be critical of the histories that they are taught, how to be more aware of the way knowledge is produced and which kinds of knowledges have authority and which don't. In order to decolonise we need to remember a history of resistance, of protest, and how that fitted in to what happened and how, in fact, resistors, protesters, anti-colonial movements have helped to reshape the histories and the events that have occurred. We also need in terms of decolonising to actually understand how systems of inequality and meanings of difference have come to be made and remade in the first place, how meanings of race were established, how meanings of class inequality gendered inequality come to mean what they mean and to note those as part of a historical process, not something that's naturalised and there and a given. So I would say that decolonising involves at least the way I understand it, a critical engagement with the knowledges that we have and that we are that are disseminated to us and to be equipped with the skills to be able to do that. So it doesn't mean, and some people do think it does, particularly within institutions like universities, there's a lot of debate about curriculums and how actually curriculums need more representation on them from non-white, non-European thinkers. So it's a kind of a question of diversifying a curriculum. But that can quickly look quite tokenistic or it doesn't actually dislodge the power and authority of the kinds of knowledges that universities are supposed to be delivering to us. In my thinking, while that is absolutely necessary, what we also need is critical thinking in a really fundamental level about knowledge production, which pushed to his extreme is really destabilising for the status quo. So the abolitionist story of the song focuses on the ship and this sets the scene of the song as happening over there or far away. If we were to decolonise this memory, this story or this fact, as I'll put it, where is the Guild Hall and the important actor in this? I think what the Guild Hall does here is to make the connection between here and there and then and then now as a particular site. So while we might remember that ship over there and far away, the fact that the song "Trial", which was held in 1784, was held in the Guild Hall, which was caught of the King's bench, means that this prestigious ancient building, which is on the National Heritage List of Brissen, which hosts the Lord Mayor's banquet, which is an extraordinary kind of marker of heritage and goth expelender and the way in which it's kind of narrated, is also through this story exposed as a place where we can see the connections between the construction of that great tradition and kind of notion of cultural heritage, kind of embodied in buildings, as secured by a history of imperialism, colonialism and slavery. So in that sense, I think that the Guild Hall is an important actor in trying to rethink, decolonise the story or the history of the song. Serious unpacking of what's going on here is just simply not being done and it's again what we were calling "colonised memory" or a selective amnesia here that actually, you know, the reckoning of the contradictions that are at stake that are brought up in this history just aren't confronted. And I'm not saying that, you know, I know what the answer would be, but I think you're absolutely right that it's extraordinary that the Guild Hall is the place where this case was heard and it was heard under these terms. Anita's work does an amazing job of showing us how our histories, when told from one side, can erase huge swathes of it. If properly confronted as death and death, the extent and all the many elements that contribute to this death and death must be properly understood and reckoned with. Through this framing, we can better understand and address racial injustice today, but where the buildings and statues in our cities fit into this. To get a handle on this evolving debate, I spoke with Dahlia Geberal. I'm a PhD student at the London School of Economics. I have been involved in many campaigns around decolonising public space, including the Rhodes Mossful campaign and Oxford and I also edited and contributed a chapter to a book on the topic, decolonising the university alongside two of my great colleagues, given to Bamberer and Karim the Shandroo Loo. I began by asking Dahlia how collective amnesia manifests itself as cultural erasure. I mean, I think there is a considerable and quite deliberate gap in Britain's public knowledge of its modern history, its modern constitution. And I think for the first time during the Rhodes Mossful campaign, that was the first time in my lifetime, someone raised here that discussions and explicit conversations around the significance and the detail of the empire were drawn out or be it in a very chaotic and in many ways unproductive way, but still the conversation was still being had. And I think that the only data that we really have on how Brits perceived that the empire is, you got poll, I'm sure many of you have heard of it, 2015, you got poll where 59% of British adults viewed the empire as something to be proud of. And I think that the fact that that is the only data that we have, it sort of testaments the level of importance that is kind of given to this topic and given to this understanding of Britain's literacy, of the literacy of British people when it comes to race and colonialism. So I think the question really is why is contesting these histories worthy of what I think that tends to often be this idea that it's in the past and often the language that we use to talk about it is different to how we talk to other periods of history, where we're told that the only framework through which we can relate to it is through the framework of either guilt or pride, which is attaching a quite useless set of emotions to something that is merely about understanding the reality of the world that we live in today, how it has come to exist, and how it continues to exist. And, you know, tales of industrial revolution have been very deliberately separated from the colonial trade routes that and, you know, the colonised labour, the enslaved labour that made the rapid development and continued development of Britain and Europe possible. The enlightenment is often conceived of as a self-contained European project rather than something that was constituted through and alongside imperialism and slavery. And, you know, these kind of twin processes of both effacing the importance of the colonial core of modernity and, you know, the kind of racialising of particular kind of principles like objectivity and, you know, history and these kind of things that exist in these very, these terms that exist in these very loaded ways are really foundational to how we understand the world around us, but they are fundamentally flawed. I guess what comes to mind to me is how hypocritical a lot of that is. All of what they're saying and describing is essentially describing themselves. So when you're talking about immigrants and immigration and and and wash it up on somebody else's shores and taking advantage and all of that kind of stuff to me, it just sounds like you're just describing Europeans in America. It sounds like you're describing Europeans in Australia. It sounds like you're describing Europeans in South and Central America. For me, that's it's like a cycle of collective amnesia of forgetting. One thing that we would hear all the time is you can't erase history and it's like no, we're learning about this to understand why our world is unequal in the way that it is and to therefore find a way through it and to create a more just world. Your guilt is useless to me by trapping it in that conversation. That's been a very effective way to kind of curtail, to curtail the real kind of material and political interventions that contestations around statues and public space in Britain are really a symbol for. So understanding how collective amnesia and forgetting and particularly in industries of finance, insurance and property, how that understanding really connects to matters of racial inequality in our present day. The key issue here is a refusal to understand that systems that have our markers of modernity and markers of so-called development are reliant upon incredibly violent patterns of extraction and exploitation of the resources and the bodies and the work of people who are racialized outside of whiteness. And I think that in order for that system to retain their integrity and their legitimacy are kind of concealing of those patterns of exploitation and those patterns of brutality that make them exit, that make them what they are. They have to be justified through repertoire and disgursive frameworks that justify why vast ways of the world's population are perennially without the basic means of survival. And are perennially facing the brute force of state violence and corporate violence. And so the function of race in that, in that those mechanisms is to create a justifying narrative of why vast ways of the human population of the world's population, the subjection of people to those forms of violence is innate, it's expected, it's uneventful. And that is where the relationship between racial inequality and ideas of racial essence and the necessary designation of vast ways of human beings as disposable or as highly exploitable, that's where the material and the culture and political and discursive come together and work together in order to allow these institutions to continue to exist. So I think this is very much a question about how those institutions have come to exist but also how they continue to exist. What do you think it will take for these institutions to really rack in with themselves if they were to deal with racial inequality today? So I think that the question is, is there a way to make it more difficult to make a living? A racist in class as well, right? And the removal of statues and monuments or the renaming of streets becomes a replacement for the work of doing anti-racism and transforming the way that we close ourselves, the ways that we call things that are part of our, the way that we coexist with one another in ways that don't rely on exploitation and hierarchy and brutalization. And I think that it's really does a real limitation to speaking about these issues without that connection to that material. If this was just about changing the stories and making nicer stories, it would be, we wouldn't be getting the backlash that we're getting. It would be much easier. The stories inform the continuation of material practices of violence and expert creation. But I think that that is a real danger that I think we start to accept that the point of this was always to just conduct a review of every statue in London. If we wanted to really get rid of every brick in London that was the product of slavery and colonialism, London wouldn't exist and that's the point. Bringing it all back to the built environment, would you think is the relationship between these different systems, buildings and spaces? To look at the story of the road statue in particular, I think it's a really good case study of why I think statues provoke the reactions that they do. Processal roads is someone who accrued sizable wealth, political influence through the blood and the labour of blacks, other Africans. He then used that wealth that was accrued through those methods to buy the allegiance and the front facing and built space of one of the most respected educational institutions in the world. He actually commissioned that statue of himself as a condition of his donation to Oriol College. And I think in the story of that statue, I think we learn about how institutions in the global north which kind of wield very significant power and influence in shaping the lives of people across the world were built physically and politically and socially and it shows us that a lot of these institutions are not the sort of neutral sites of knowledge exchange. They are sites where power is consolidated and reproduced. We don't learn how he came to be there or from where his ability to be a munificent benefactor came from. It's taken for granted to the extent that it just kind of fades in the background like you could walk past that statue every day for 20 years and not notice it and it just sort of comes to be in a way that was never really explained and isn't explicit. So it has this kind of like hypervisibility because it's literally on the high street but this simultaneous invisibility. It's everywhere but we barely see it and I think that is very much emblematic of our relationship to colonialism and slavery. It is the dark on the side of modernity which I think Maldonado Torres calls it. So it's infused in all of these systems that we take for granted that we use every day and that are very much a part of our everyday life but it's not named. On the back of that I wanted to ask if you felt that there was any difference between the statues of colonizers of slave and slavers and buildings of empire and slavery. For example we're talking about Royal Exchange versus Edward Colson. Is there a difference in sort of yeah the statues versus the buildings? The question here is not is this building immoral or did he just think that the building think that it was just obeying the values of its time but rather thinking what was the purpose of that building then what was the purpose of that building now? What is the connection between those two things and what are we want that building to be for in the future? That could mean it could sometimes it looks like repurposing. Sometimes it looks like transformation. Sometimes it looks like abolition. That's the interesting conversation and I think that buildings lend themselves to that a little bit more because it kind of depersonalises it. It doesn't become a conversation on how many good things did he do and how many bad things did he do and is one worse or better than the other because that's a really boring conversation and doesn't really get us anywhere. So I actually think that in many ways campaigns around buildings could be more fruitful in that kind of discussion. So if the society sought to confront these cultures of Eurasia in our histories and their amnesia that this Eurasia leads to, could we create reparative history? And then I guess second to that is how could or how would these buildings such as the Royal Exchange or the Guild Hall or you know Jamaica Coffee House? How could they play a role? I think that the reason the role that you know this kind these kinds of conversations have in that question of a reparative history is when you think about the reparations movement and what is meant when we talk about reparations the first hurdle towards a reparative justice, the thing that we still haven't gotten over is the recognition, is the recognition of the need for repair, the recognition that something was broken, that people were broken, that lands were broken, that the climate was broken and it was broken by particular processes and particular path, these aren't natural you know processes, these are man-made ones that we are all accountable for and I think that that that necessary recognition is such an important first step to that and that still hasn't happened yet and I think what the contestations around these buildings and around these statues was always about, was it was about trying to push through collective action and also through concretising these conversations in quite specific ways to begin to build that recognition and to begin to build the possibilities of that recognition and even in the past five years I've seen a shift right like when I when I was involved in Rosemarsfall in 2015 when this was one of the first kind of like it probably wasn't the first time but it was like a very early iteration of these kinds of of movements and these kinds of approach these kinds of methods and I don't know if anyone remembers it but it was not received well it was absolutely it struck a nerve that I didn't know was so raw now I think that conversation is looking really different that's not to say that you know we're not still having some of the same arguments like what it means to erase history and what is and is not a raising history and what history even is we're still having those conversations but the tenor and the basic principles of understanding of those conversations are very very different and that I think is testament to the work of the work of public education the work of that kind of contestation that it has caused that shift and it can sometimes because these changes happen very incrementally it can sometimes feel very despairing and very sort of like oh my god like we're worse in a worse situation you know 2015 was pre-Trump right we're in a worse position now but I think that there has been shifts have been made in that time that will be very difficult to undo and I can see that in the younger generation I can see that in the protest that we have seen over the summer they were made of something different than in 2015 we continue to erase and project the version of history that is most comfortable nevertheless the finance systems of stocks and shares the commercial laws and marine insurance tell us as much if not more about the attitudes and behavior that built and shaped these systems than the narrative selected and disseminated by abolitionists and what's more these systems were never abolished they are alive and thriving we shouldn't forget any of this all the facts that the places and buildings were all this took place here in London still stand the architecture of our cities are not just artifacts that remind us of this history they are an active actor in colonial and contemporary race relations I'm Celeste Setifur and you're listening to slavery and the city this episode has been produced in partnership with the City of London Corporation as part of its drive to tackle racism in all its forms its tackling racism task force is leading this work assessing what further action the city corporation can take to promote economic, educational and social inclusion and considering how to respond to the historical issues such as statues and monuments you can find out more at our city together drop London if you'd like to hear our full interviews with Anita Ruprecht and Daliya Gebriel sign up to become an open city friend and you'll be able to access the full interviews with Celeste and all the amazing contributors for the series for 125 a week you can support the hosting costs of the open city podcast helping to keep conversations about the city open, honest and accessible alongside the open city podcast we have the London our weekly roundup of the week's top London architecture news tune in every Thursday morning with Merlin Fultcher and a roster of special guests