Expected launch: mid-June 2023!

Colston’s Last Journey is an interactive audio project. A sea of interactive audio is layered over the centre of Bristol/UK. It extends all the way along the historic Broadquay from the Colston plinth (where the statue of Edward Colston used to stand) to the other end of Pero’s Bridge (the historic Broad Quay), which is where the Colston statue was flung into the waters of the Bristol Floating Harbour by protestors on 7 June 2020.

To access this audio experience you will be able to downlead an app to your smartphone, go to the start of the soundscape at Colston’s plinth in Bristol city centre and Enter The Time Portal.

You are immediately afloat on the interactive audio-ocean, the Sea of Woe: fragments of facts, statements, re-created dialogues, names of captains, slave trade statistics, commentaries from the time etc etc – all taken from or with relevance to Bristol’s involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade – arise out of the liquid depths of the Sea of Woe and spiral in to you.

But it’s even more than that: floating upon the audio-sea and moored along the historic Broad Quay are 9 ‘ghost slave ships’. These are the ghosts of real ships which actually sailed from Bristol to the coast of West Africa and then on to the West Indies  in the 17th and 18th centuries. Each of these audio-slave ships represents a different aspect of the trafficking of enslaved Africans. When you come across one , you can board it* and listen in to that particular aspect of the slave trade that ship represents. Then you re-embark on the audio-ocean and continue on your voyage of discovery.

(*metaphorically – what actually happens is that you walk into ‘a soundpool’: you hear a ‘swoosh’ sound and the audio content particular to that ship fades up. When you ‘disembark’, you hear the ‘swoosh’ again, the sounds of that ship fade away and you are back on the Sea of Woe.)

VIDEO OF WALK-THRU’ HERE (work-in-progress only!)

INFORMATION ABOUT ‘PORTABLE VERSION’ – plays anywhere in the world –

THIS IS A WORK OF SOUNDART, NOT AN HISTORICAL GUIDE

Permission to use data from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Database gratefully acknowledged