Cast in Stone

Data sources, methods and editorial decisions: UK

The Cast in Stone project is concerned primarily with statues related to colonial history in Britain and France, which are free-standing, anthropomorphic (i.e. depictions of humans, real or imagined), and in public space. The aim of the project is to identify a definable but finite dataset of artefacts, which can be used to make systematic, albeit preliminary observations about collective memories of empire and the visualisation of those memories through public art, in these two post-imperial nations. As the research progressed, we discovered the need to make some exceptions to the initial criteria in order to capture information about crucial parts of the process. Our data sources, criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and methods are described below. We hope that this will offer transparency, and also encourage reuse of Open Access data we have identified and processed. 

We have offered overlapping but separate descriptions of this process for the dataset as it relates to France and to the UK. This is because the specific conditions of France and Britain have meant that the two parts of the team have developed distinct approaches to data sourcing and analysis, which are united in spirit but different in details.

Data sources

Historic England is the statutory body that maintains the only and up-to-date official list of heritage buildings and sites in England. (For Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, see Exclusions. Our first and principal source of data was the Open Data Hub of Historic England. As per the requirements of Historic England, we note that: ‘The Historic England Data contained in this material was obtained on 25 April 2023. The most publicly available up to date Historic England Data can be obtained from historicengland.org.uk.’ ‘Statues’ do not form a separate category within Historic England’s listing system. The categories are buildings, monuments, sites, gardens and battlefields. Statues are classified as ‘buildings’ within this classificatory scheme. 

We have supplemented and corrected this data by taking information from other crowd-sourced websites as well as academic sources. Principal among them are: 

• The list of Boer War memorials in England on Wikimedia Commons
• The website Topple the Racists
• The 2021 report The Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration in Wales
• UCL, Legacies of British Slavery database
• University of Essex, British Public Monuments Related To Slavery
• Belfast City Hall, Memorials and Statues

Individual research on the internet and in secondary literature, focused on specific cities, including Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Liverpool and London (particularly Westminster), i.e. the capital cities of the four nations of the United Kingdom, and three major port cities known to have been historically associated with slavery.

Methods

On 25 April 2023 we downloaded a .csv file of 349,398 of listed buildings (which includes all listed statues), which we converted into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of use, and it is downloadable here. 

Since the volume of data – 349,398 buildings – was too large for manual checking, we used searches in the Excel spreadsheet for ‘statue’ and ‘bust’ and identified 862 statues. We included all statues that depicted human beings, historical or allegorical, were free-standing, and in open space.

We then proceeded to manually check the details of all 862 statues in order to identify the statues that were of colonial or imperial relevance. 

Inclusion criteria

This selection process entailed historical research to establish whether the individual depicted by the statue:

1. Held any civil or military positions in any of the colonies of the British Empire 
2. Had undertaken significant business ventures in any of the colonies of the British Empire 
3. Had familial or personal connections with any part of the British empire, whether by being indigenous to the region, or having spent significant amounts of time in the region, or having been related to individuals in category  
4. Had played significant roles in shaping policies affecting any part of the British Empire 
5. Had owned, traded in, or profited from enslaved human beings 
6. Had produced significant artistic or literary work discussing or depicting events or locations within the British Empire 
7. Was a monarch, prime minister, or senior military official of the UK  

As this list of inclusion criteria should indicate, our dataset is not premised on culpability of individuals for colonialist or racist harm or otherwise, but on historic association with colonialism and imperialism. Therefore, it includes statues of individuals who were part of colonised communities; it also includes statues of individuals who opposed imperialism in general or specific imperial policies, the enslavement of human beings, and racism.

Other data sources

We then proceeded to supplement that data in the following ways:  

Tommy identified that we had missed a potentially productive search term – memorial. Tommy worked through an existing compiled list of Boer War memorials in England on Wikimedia Commons to identify those memorials which had physical human statues placed on top.  Based on targeted searches on the internet for Boer/South African war memorials, Tommy also added a few more statues in Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast (in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). Some of these statues depict an anonymous “Tommy” solider, while others depict allegorical figures (such as the Newcastle Boer War Memorial). At 41, the Boer War Memorials now form the second largest cluster of statues in our database, second only to statues of Queen Victoria. Nearly all are listed by Historic England. 

Tommy undertook further searches in the Topple the Racists; The Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration in Wales (2021); UCL, Legacies of British Slavery database; University of Essex, British Public Monuments Related To Slavery and Imperial War Museum, War Memorials Register in order to identify a further 121 statues, some of which are in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or in British Overseas territories.

Much of this work required meticulous distillation and cross-referencing. For example, the University of Essex, British Public Monuments Related To Slavery contains 906 monuments. Selecting 'Monument type: Statue Bust or Relief' in the search box shows 216 entries. Excluding any statues that are already in our database, were not in public spaces, or did not fit our criteria for inclusion left only around 5 statues that could be added to our database. The majority of BPRMS entries comprise of funerary monuments that are often inside churches.

In many cases, identified statues will have been cross-referenced across multiple databases. For example, a Boer War Memorial on Wikimedia’s compiled list would then be searched on the web to identify if there was a matching entry on the Imperial War Museum’s memorials register or on Historic England to complement the data being gathered. Similarly, statues with existing entries from our initial Historic England dataset would be checked against the Legacies of British Slavery database and/or the British Public Monuments Related to Slavery database. These cross-references helped to enrich the data we gathered across multiple statues, as well as allowing users of Cast in Stone to discover other useful reference points when learning about the legacies of empire. 

Finally, data about one unlisted statue - that of the novelist Agatha Christie, in Torquay, was added by the PI, Nandini Chatterjee.

This list of 448 British statues is non-exhaustive. Our data leans towards listed statues, and is centred on the largest Open Access dataset available for England. There are many more statues in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (see exclusions), and many unlisted statues than those we have been able to identify.

Discretionary inclusions

We have included in the database the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College, Oxford, and the statue of a Black African male child in the ‘Blackboy clock’ at Stroud (one of our case studies) although they are not free-standing, being instead parts of larger buildings or structures. In both these cases, the larger structures to which these statues are attached – Oriel College and the Blackboy Clock – are themselves listed by Historic England.

Our decision to include the Rhodes statue arises from the international visibility and importance of the Rhodes Must Fall movements in South Africa and in Oxford. These movements set the tone for much of the discussion around iconography and iconoclasm from 2015 onwards.

The 'Blackboy clock' at Stroud is included because it alerts us to the importance of subsidiary, decorative elements that are the principal location of the depiction of people of colour in British public statuary. One the one hand, this offers the possibility of recovering a long British history of artistic depictions and public awareness of colonised people. On the other hand, it points towards the importance of decorative elements as a widely shared visual language of racism and its normalisation.

These inclusions are accounted for in the count above.

Exclusions

There are obvious shortcomings of this process and our resultant data.

Our dataset does not systematically include data in relation to statues in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland, although a small number of statues from these nations have been included. Open Source Data for statues in these three nations is available from Historic Environment Scotland;  Listed Buildings, Cadw, Wales; and Historic Environment, Department of Communities, Northern Ireland, and may be used in a future, expanded version of this project.

We have not considered any statues that are inside buildings, such as churches, town halls, schools and other such structures. These types of sites are in fact densely populated with colonial statuary, that are often historically connected with specific individual statues or groups of statues that are in open air. Once again, in a future, expanded version of the project, we may be able to gather that data and to analyse it.