Public Consultation and Local Democracy in Re-naming Processes
How should legal and administrative processes deal with calls to rename parts of the urban landscape that memorialise controversial historical figures?
Recent events have led to widespread discussion about contested heritage, including the memorialisation of Britain’s slave trading and colonial pasts in the built environment. Debate about these issues – including as part of the so-called “culture war” – has included whether to remove, retain and explain monuments, buildings and streets. While academic and public attention has typically focused on key artefacts such as the Churchill Statue in Parliament Square or Colston statue in Bristol, this research project, led by Drs Emily Haslam and Suhraiya Jivraj and funded by the British Academy’s BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Programme, focuses on less monumental parts of the urban landscape, such as street names, as the sites through which people navigate their everyday lives.
Many of the procedures that are available to councils to respond to such debates, such as national laws on street naming and re-naming, were not drafted with the issue of controversial historical figures at the forefront of legislators’ minds. Thus, local councils have been compelled to apply them to circumstances that were not previously envisaged, or to adapt and develop new processes. In 2023, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 established in law ‘the democratic right of communities to be engaged and to protect local heritage’ (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities 2022) by requiring local authorities to have the ‘necessary support’ before a proposed name change can proceed. This project seeks to understand the role and potential role, of laws in these debates.
This project builds on our previous study entitled ‘Public Consultation and Local Democracy in Re-naming Processes: Navigating Sir John Hawkins’ which explored debates about renaming parts of the cityscape in Chatham, North Kent and Plymouth, Devon, after Sir John Hawkins, widely acknowledged to be England’s first slave trader. We examined how different legal models and approaches were adopted to deal with the re-naming of a car park and a square. We focused in particular on the impact that these different processes had on public participation. The study demonstrates that further research is needed on the diverse legal processes and approaches to re-naming that are being adopted elsewhere
We, therefore, now extend that study. We are particularly interested in the extent to which local governmental legal and administrative processes facilitate public participation in controversies surrounding the commemoration of historical figures in the urban landscape and the effects of such participation. We intend to focus on four key sites: London, Liverpool, Plymouth and Glasgow/Edinburgh.
For more information on the project please contact:
Dr Emily Haslam: E.Haslam@lboro.ac.uk