The Echoing Gallery: Bristol Poets on Art in the City

“What is the first cause of the Slave-Trade,” Coleridge asked, “Is it not self-evidently the consumation of its Products! and does not Guilt rest on the Consumers? and is it not an allowed axiom in Morality that Wickedness may be multiplied but cannot be divided and that the Guilt of all attaches to each one who is knowingly an accomplice?”

Pero’s Bridge is a footbridge across Bristol’s Floating Harbour in Southwest England. It is also a monumental sculpture by Eilis O’Connell which incorporates a bascule drawbridge. The sculpture itself is the counterweight. The footbridge is a local icon with the 21^st century addition of hundreds of love locks. In June 2020, in view of Pero’s Bridge, the statue of the 17^th century slaver Edward Colson was toppled and pushed into the harbour.

Pero was a slave from the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. In the late 1700’s he was a servant of the Bristol sugar baron John Pinney, whose house is now known as the Georgian House Museum. John Pinney was an early patron of William Wordsworth. Pero Jones, to give his full name, was treated as a family member, but according to the fugitive facts, was never officially freed.