Discussion between members of Deptford People’s Heritage Museum and researchers of The Monument is the Struggle chaired by Dr Janna Graham.

De-sedimenting colonial histories of the Deptford Dockyard The Monument is the Struggle is a long term research project exploring how the logics of colonial administration, geography, finance, and community organisation figure in contemporary urban spaces and communities. The Deptford Dockyard is a former naval maritime centre from which ships associated with the East India Company and trans-Atlantic enslavement departed throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and at which key architects of the colonial and plantation systems met regularly. It was also one in a network of global dockyards at which the ‘common winds’ of masterlessness and rebellion were spread. It is now a development site scheduled for a multi-million pound luxury real estate project on the south side of the Thames. The Deptford People’s Heritage Museum, an invented ‘museum without walls’ set up in a local food bank to contest the development asks how can the inheritances of the dockyard be mapped into a more complex temporality, linking the past, present and future. Shifting the terrain from questions of commemoration and monumentality and towards the structures and infrastructures of feeling, the Museum set up the Monument is the Struggle to understand how the spectres of colonisation, enslavement and the plantation register in local urban experience?

Supported by the Department of Visual Cultures, including students, alumni and community researchers, the project proceeds through local study groups reading sessions, walks, curricula, long term processes and campaigns.

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