Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Annual Conference 2023
Demands to ‘decolonise’ have grown louder and louder in recent years, not least in architecture, architectural history and heritage. In Britain public monuments and spaces have loomed large in discussions about the legacies of slavery and empire and the processes of repair, from Edward Colston in Bristol and Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, to Winston Churchill and numerous others in London – as has the ‘colonial countryside’ manifest in National Trust and English Heritage properties and their interpretation. Meanwhile, the dynamics and effects of British colonialism play out in buildings, cities and landscapes across the world: in the reshaping of the Raj’s New Delhi by the Indian government, for example, or in the perpetuation of plantation structures in the Caribbean.
In seeking to forge a decolonial architecture, architectural history and heritage practice amid a polarised debate, it is necessary to deepen our understanding of the built environment’s complex entanglements with coloniality – not just the act of colonialism, but also the social, economic and political relations and attitudes that spawned, sustained and endured beyond it. Moreover, the disciplines involved in the production of knowledge about built environments and how they are formed in different temporalities and geographies must take a broader view, scrutinising not just the subjects of research, but the methods deployed and the modes used to disseminate the results.
This conference focuses on the coloniality of architecture and heritage in relation to the British Empire, from the early years of expansionism and the escalation of the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the physical and political force wielded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the development of racial capitalism, to the subsequent and ongoing struggles for independence, freedom and justice.