LANCASTER BLACK HISTORY GROUP

Isabella Tyler (Sixth form student at Lancaster Girls Grammar School)

After the Black Lives Matter protests in Lancaster in June 2020, a local retired teacher, Jill Novell, raised some questions about Lancaster Street names on New Quay, including the names of streets on a 1970s developed industrial estate and an adjacent new housing estate. It was with Jill’s questions about the origin of these street names, and the (unacknowledged) meanings of these names, that we set out on our research project with Lancaster Black History Group in the Autumn of 2020. How did these streets get named? And what do the names mean or connote?

We haven’t as yet been able to ascertain how local authorities made decisions about the naming of any of the streets we researched, either those named in the 1970s on the industrial estate after ships, or those streets on the new housing estate with names such as Africa Drive. During the pandemic, an archivist from Lancashire Archives called Vicki McCann, kindly searched through council minutes from the 1970s seeking to find answers for us to no avail. We also wrote to the city council about the names on the new estate, but the information we received back wasn’t very enlightening, although we did gather oral evidence that some city counsellors did ask questions about the Redrow Street names at the time planning permissions were given. We will continue to probe. What we did manage to do though was research the associations of these street names and traced their possible connections to Lancaster’s maritime history, including the transatlantic slave trade.

In other blogs from this project we consider street names on the Lune Industrial Estate (streets developed in the 1970s), many of which are named after ships made in Lancaster, such as Thetis and Paragon. This blog is a little different, as I consider the names of two neighbouring streets with more abstract names, Gold Lane and Africa Drive, on a much more recently built estate, the Riverside View Estate which was developed by the house builders Redrow in 2014. These streets house medium size family homes –and are a style of housing Redrow term “heritage” and we might presume that whoever named these streets Gold Lane and Africa Drive imagined these names contributed to the heritage of this housing development.

Gold Lane is located almost parallel to Africa Drive on the the Riverside View Estate. As a city which held an active role in transatlantic slave trade, it seems logical to assess the meaning of these still very new street names, regarding the local historical context in which they have been named by the housing developer (and agreed by city council). Given the location of these streets and their heritage style family houses on the Quay, we can presume they have been named in reference to Lancaster’s mercantile history – a history which in the 18^th and early 19^th century included trade in enslaved Africans.

Gold is relevant to slavery in a multitude of ways. Notably, the Royal Africa Company was founded in 1660, with the primary purpose of extracting gold from the Gambia river. The company grew to control a monopoly of trade across the west coast of Africa and later, the licensing of a trade in enslaved Africans. This short film is a useful introduction to the slave trade in the Tudor Period, and its connections from the outset to the British Monarchy.

Gold was central to the profit-motifs which drove the trade of enslaved people from the offset. As the slave trade increased, gold was increasingly demanded by African chiefs in exchange for enslaved people and became an important currency in the slave trade.

As the Royal Africa company started trading, it created a new coin, the guinea (which was named after the guinea coast of Africa). This coin was made from guinea gold and used specifically in the trade of enslaved people. The term guinea extended further to Slave ships and sometimes slave owners, from the 17^th to the 19^th century, being known as ‘Guineamen’.  Sukhdev Sandhu summarises this as he writes,

“Not for nothing did a coin- the guinea- derive its etymology from the West African region of that name, the area from which hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were seized against their will. For traders in 17^th and 18^th-century Britain, the stigmatised African was quite literally a unit of currency”

Gold also holds inextricable relevance to the Atlantic slave trade, due to the historic trade between Europe and Africa, from what is known as the ‘Gold Coast’. 18th century

“Between 1700 and 1808, British and American merchants sent ships to gather slaves in six basic regions of Africa: Senegambia, Sierra Leone/the Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa (Kongo, Angola).”

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship

Such trade was sparked by European contest for the acquisition of the precious metal.  Portugal built the first fort on the coast, El Mina, in 1482 to protect its hoard of gold from European rivals. Eventually other Maritime powers siezed and built forts of their own, which resulted in “a string of fortifications along the five-hundred-mile coastline, from the port of Assini in the west to the river Volta in the east”^[1]. It was from outposts under English control that traders would load ‘black gold’ (African prisoners) on to the lower decks of ships.^[2] 

Lancaster Slave Traders, who specialised in small fast ships, had a preference for the Sierra Leone/Windward Cost just North of the Guinea Coast/Gold Coast. relationship between Lancaster and this area of West Africa, can be seen in the story of the “Lancaster-born slaver”, Miles Barber, who “who established one of the most significant commercial slaving hubs in the history of the British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade”^[3]. Barber’s ‘Factory Island’, as it was called (now called Kassa Island) was situated on one of the îles de Los, a group of Islands off the African coast of Guinea. Barber “developed and managed an estimated eleven slave factories and barracoons along this stretch of African coast” and in 1776, his contemporaries characterised him as the owner of “the greatest guinea house in Europe”. ^[4] 

In the 18^th century, Lancaster was the fourth largest slave-trading centre in England. With this history in mind, the significance of naming two new streets Gold Lane and Africa Drive, without any context given as to why they were given these names, seems to shift. It feels appropriate to hold an awareness of the African lives which suffered at the hands of European lust for gold and wealth, when living in a city which capitalised from this suffering.

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References

^[1] Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘The First Black Britons’, BBC History, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/black_britons_01.shtml

^[1] Marcus Rediker, 2007, The Slave Ship, John Murray, Great Britan, page 85

^[2] Marcus Rediker, 2007, The Slave Ship, John Murray, Great Britan, page 87

^[3] Imogen Tyler, 2020, Stigma, The Machinery of Inequality, Zed Books Ltd, London, page 13

^[4] Melinda Elder, ‘The Liverpool Slave Trade, Lancaster and Its Environs’, in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slaver, ed. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press ,2007), 121.

See also Bruce J. Mouser, Illes de Los as bulking center in the slave trade, 1750-1800′ 

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