EXCLUSIVE: Colston report to go before Bristol City Council in December
More than 10,000 Bristolians have given their opinion on what should happen to the statue
We can exclusively reveal work has begun to create a report, which will recommend to Bristol City Council what should happen to the statue of Edward Colston.
At the moment Colston is on display at the M Shed museum on the Harbourside, having been torn down from his plinth by protestors during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in June 2020.
Colston is known to be responsible for the transportation of tens of thousands of Africans to America during the slave trade, but had a statue in the city centre for more than a century calling him a "wise and virtuous son of the city".
As part of our coverage of Black History Month we recently spoke to University of Bristol professor Tim Cole who chairs the We Are Bristol History Commission.
The Commission helped set up the exhibit and has been running a survey alongside it asking Bristolians what should happen to the statue long term.
All of Bristol engaged
We can reveal "well over" 10,000 people have taken part in the survey, which has closed this month to allow the commission to examine the responses.
"The thing that we're busy doing at the moment is really crunching the numbers," professor Cole told us.
"It's great because it's from all the way across the city, so from all parts of the city, from all different age groups in the city as well so loads of engagement from young people in the city which is really great to see.
"What we're doing in the process now is literally pouring over it so we can present those results back to the city in December and also offer a series of recommendations to the city council, in a sense to say 'this is what people in the city are saying, this is what we feel the city council should do next, with both the statue and the plinth'."
The M Shed exhibition is due to run until January.
The idea is that publishing the report in December will allow Bristolians to examine the results and then go back to the exhibition if they so wish, to take it in again.
"There's been lines of people waiting to get in (to the exhibition)," professor Cole continued.
"There was a journalist who I chatted to who went to the exhibition in the early months.
"She is a seasoned journalist who goes to a lot of exhibitions in a lot of museums and writes reviews of them.
"And she said to me, 'I've never seen so many young people at a museum exhibition in my life' and that's the thing that really struck her."
WATCH: Our video report from the opening of the Colston exhibition
The Commission's other work
The We Are Bristol History Commission was set up in response to the toppling of the Colston statue, but it is not only working on the aftermath of that event.
Instead, Professor Cole says he sees the statue merely as the "starting point" of its work.
"Alongside that we've also been introducing that broader question of what have we remembered within the city?
"And including also now the second question we've moved onto, which is where have we come from?
"A lot of that work has been focused around something called Bridging Histories, that we've been running over the summer."
He describes Bridging Histories as a chance for people to start sharing stories of their own migrant histories.
People can get involved through the Bridging Histories website.
"There's some really lovely work that's starting to appear from there and that's been a project that we've just really started over the last few months and one that will develop and develop we hope.
"Which will be a chance in some ways to transition a bit from the sense of who we've remembered in the city, to think a bit more about well who are we as a city?"
History "too important" to just leave to historians
According to professor Cole, the debate around Colston is an example of how history can engage the wider public and therefore why the study of it, should not just be left to a few.
"One thing I am really interested in as a historian is the sense that history is something that is too important to stay within the narrow confines of a university or a library," he said.
"I'm interetsed in the sense that history is something that needs to be at the core of our every day lives.
"One thing that's been interesting in Bristol with the toppling of the statue and the conversations after it, is that I think that's really happened in the city.
"People are asking questions about the history of the city, about transatlantic slave economy and how far Bristol has evolved in that, about why a statue was put up to Colston in the late 1890s, about whether it's right to take statues down or not.
"There's lots of questions that people are asking aren't there, about the past.
"History is way too important to just leave to university students.
"It's way too important to just leave to academics.
"It's something that actually matters to everyone."