Description
In February 2025, I was contacted by Dr. Sunita Abraham of the Lancaster Black History Group and Lancaster University regarding a project initiated by Lancaster’s Mayor for 2024-25, Councillor Abi Mills, and Lancaster City Council. I would be working with Prof. Gordon Walker (acting as an advisor) from Lancaster University to research several items of historic furniture within the Town Hall collection.The principal aim of this research was to identify whether there were items of furniture in the Town Hall produced by the Lancaster-based firm Gillows & Co, in addition to those already part of public information about the Town Hall collection. This information would then be made into display boards, including information on any links to the firm’s involvement with the slave trade during Lancaster’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ during the 1700s and into the 1800s. Much of the Gillow’s furniture of the period was made from mahogany, and this colonial commodity is in some ways unique compared to many of the other products of enslaved labour. Unlike sugar, rum, dyes, rice and tobacco, it is not a consumable product and can still be seen today as a tangible product of the enslavement of millions of people. After further investigation, we found three pieces of historic furniture: a sideboard and also a set of table and chairs from the early nineteenth-century and a nineteenth-century cabinet. Two of these pieces were certainly manufactured by Gillows, and whilst we have not been able to definitively confirm the provenance of the third, it is possible that it was at the very least designed using Gillows’ sketch books.
| Period | 3/02/2025 → 1/07/2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Lancaster Black History Group |
| Degree of Recognition | Local |