How to help a community explore its slave-trading history: Lesley English, Head of Library Engagement at Lancaster University Library, explains how the library plays a key role in building bridges between town and gown.

FROM its epicentre in Minneapolis USA, the Black Lives Matter movement led to demonstrations in towns and cities across the world. One was Lancaster, where protests led to the formation of the Lancaster Black History community group.

At the same time a more bureaucratic revolution was being set in motion at Lancaster University Library by its five-year vision – The Library Towards 2025. This aimed to put the “Library at the heart of Lancaster University’s community, local and global. We connect, we innovate, we include.”

A paragraph from the University and LBH’s joint research project explains the value offered by these two movements working together and the environment in which this work is taking place: “One of the problems with how we learn history at school and beyond, is that it is often segregated into distinct blocks – that is we might study the Atlantic slave trade or the history of the industrial revolution at school, but we tend do so separately. What we miss is the crucial connections ... We believe making these connections can revolutionise the ways people think about place, community and belonging in the present. These omissions, silences, secrets and gaps are particularly evident in how we learn about local history — if we learn about it at all.

“As chair of LBH Geraldine Onek recently reflected, she learnt about the slave trade while studying at secondary school in Lancaster but was never taught that the square she was walking through every day on her way to school, Lindow Square, was named after a slave trader. William Lindow lived in a house near the site of the school, the same house, built and lavishly furnished from the profits of slavery business, a house we now also know was also the likely residence of a black servant called John Chance. There is currently no way of ‘seeing’ this history. This absence of knowledge of local history can create shocking oversights”.

Recognised

In this article I will highlight our work with LBH, exploring the initiatives developed in collaboration with the group. These provided a template for working with other communities and groups locally. They are initiatives that could be of interest beyond Lancaster. This was acknowledged when they were included in our 2022 submission for the Times Higher Education Awards ‘Outstanding Library Team’ which we went on to win. The award judges said: “The work of the library succeeded in its aim of deepening the connection between the campus and the local community and of demystifying the university by partnership working to both increase access and to develop collections. It demonstrated a partnership approach between the university, academics and the local community that is sustainable and would also be scalable to other parts of the sector.”

The project has involved interlinked activities which collectively support the library ambition to develop extended communities and services, to build the confidence of our community and demystify the library, the university, and the academic world, providing a gateway into the university. These include:

• Establishing a Library Community Card providing free access to our print collections
• Collaboration between Lancaster University Library and the Lancaster Black History community group to support the Lancaster Slavery Family Trees Community Project, including hosting a hybrid conference
• Launching the Library’s first Glocal (global and local) Collection, consisting of books about Lancaster’s historical role as the fourth largest transatlantic slave-trading port in the 18th century
• Hosting our first Library Festival – a hybrid event showcasing library and university activities. These initiatives have enabled both the library and the university to demonstrate their commitment to being a civic university that engages with and supports local communities, individuals, and groups.

The award recognises the work of colleagues across all Library teams.

Diversifying collections and services

It is interesting to reflect where the involvement with LBH started. The Faculty Librarian role at Lancaster is seen as the key link between the library and the academic departments, and strong partnerships have developed. Colleagues in the team have been involved with initiatives such as Decolonising Lancaster, encouraging recommendations for purchase from staff and students from a dedicated fund with the aim of readdressing historical bias in the collections and making them more diverse. From this initial focus, a broader ambition was realised, to diversifying library services and collections, to ensure that under-represented groups are recognised and feel included. From the Decolonising Lancaster initiative, relationships formed with Lancaster academics and key members of LBH. The work of LBH has focused to date on Lancaster's role as Britain's fourth largest slave trading port in the 18th century, and on making this history accessible and visible through collaborative work with schools, university students, faith organisations, refugee and arts, museums, and heritage organisations.

Lancaster Slavery Family Trees Community History Project

One of their first projects, the Slavery Family Trees project (2020-2022), saw over 30 members from the community work with LBH to research the ways in which prominent local families in 18th century Lancaster were associated with Atlantic slavery, and to map how this influenced the economic growth and development of Lancaster and the surrounding areas.

Community members worked alongside staff from Lancaster University, University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), Lancaster Museums, Lancashire Archives and Lancaster University Library to trace the history and links that five prominent local families had with either the triangular transatlantic slave trade or bilateral trade with the plantations, examining their family trees and highlighting the interconnections both locally and globally to other families, business and faith groups associated with direct and/or indirect links to the slave trade and plantation slavery. The library’s role was to support research of primary and secondary source materials.

Seven groups were formed to produce community stories and learning relating to these five family trees, with the aim of the project to co-produce and develop educational resources for use by the local community and regional groups, to enable local people to work together to face the past, and in doing so transform the future. This process enables the groups to undertake reparative historical research – using digital resources, databases, old and new historical data, and the local community to reimagine history, bring healing and positive change.

Lancaster Black History Group: Slavery Family Trees Conference

Lancaster University Library has supported the work of LBH from the outset, working with the group to organise a community conference in autumn 2021, with over two-hundred community participants, enabling school students, university students, faith groups and refugee groups to share their research findings. The conference took place in the newly opened events space in the library, however, with the UK following strict Covid-19 restrictions, in-person places in the events space had to be restricted to allow social-distancing, and so the library’s first hybrid conference went ahead, with the advantage of making the talks accessible online so guests did not need to be in Lancaster to participate.

Glocal Collection

The collaboration with LBH and support for community research through the Lancaster Family Trees Project inspired library colleagues to curate the first ‘Glocal’ collection (global stories with local links) with members of LBH, a physical library collection housed and funded by the library, which was officially launched at the conference.

The idea behind the Glocal Collection is that it is both local and global in scope, providing local people, schools, and community groups with the opportunity to loan books and other texts to find out more about Lancashire’s connections to Atlantic slavery and crucially to discover more about the histories of the places across the globe that Lancaster became connected to through its ties to the wider ‘slavery business.’

With this collection, LBH and the University also acknowledged the history of the land on which the Lancaster University Bailrigg campus was built. The land was purchased and enclosed in the early 19th century by a man called Joshua Hinde (1722-1812). Part of a Lancastrian slave-trading and plantation owning dynasty, Joshua sold cargoes of enslaved people landed by English slave ships in the West-Indies and was the manager on a sugar plantation in Grenada before he retired back to Lancaster and used some of his ill-gotten wealth to turn Bailrigg into a private agricultural estate. While the University has no direct connection with the Hinde family, the history of the land on which the campus is built is emblematic of the city of Lancaster’s connections to Transatlantic Slavery.

Over 60 primary schools and several secondary schools are currently working with LBH and other organisations in the region to introduce local histories of slavery into the school curriculum, and the university library and the Glocal Collection continue to play a pivotal role in supporting community access to academic research on this topic. In 2023 the university funded a new PhD scholarship to further develop the accessibility of the Glocal Collection, and the important Sattherwaite Letter Books digital collection, to schools and the wider local community.

Community membership

Restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic meant that for much of 2020 and 2021 access to the library was limited to Lancaster University staff and students. While multiple paid external membership schemes were in place, they had to be put on pause, with no access to the building or print resources for community members.

During this period, the development of a position statement on the ‘Principles of Open Research' by the Library, coupled with the curation of the Glocal Collection started conversations around offering free access to the library building and print collections to members of the community. Senior university colleagues supported the idea of a Community Card, which would align with both the Library Vision and the University Strategy placing community engagement as a core activity.

Community Card membership would allow members to borrow six print books, loanable for six weeks which could be renewed if not requested by a university member. Access to library electronic resources is not possible due to licence restrictions, however, a LibGuide (SpringShare product) that advises of good quality Open Access resources that can be accessed freely is available via the library website.

What’s in a building?

It may be useful to look at how our library building, and more notably the most recent extension, have made some of our community engagement possible. While the original university library was constructed in 1967 the building has needed to grow to meet demand, with increasing student numbers. This included an extension in 1997, a major remodelling in 2015 and the most recent extension which opened in 2021, offering an additional 400 study spaces, supported learning area providing dedicated space for teaching and guidance from Faculty Librarian and Learning Developer teams, a collaborative research and project space and an events and exhibition area. The library provides a 21st century learning environment which reflects the ways in which students, staff and visitors want to use the space, and benefits all our university communities. Having a dedicated events and exhibition space enables us to promote the work we do around partnership and collaboration, engaging with the wider Lancaster and Morecambe community as well as students and research groups. The space has offered new opportunities to work with communities across the city, including refugee and asylum seeker groups, local schools and colleges and community groups such as LBH and the Sewing Café Lancaster.

What we’ve learned

It is important to reflect on, and to share the opportunities and challenges, in our work around community engagement for those thinking about developing your offer.

Buy-in from senior university colleagues is key, especially when exploring free community membership. At Lancaster, previous membership schemes generated an annual income of approximately £2500 (based on 2018/19 membership). In addition, there may be a feeling that we are a university library, shouldn’t we just be open to university students, researchers, and staff. The proposed scheme was endorsed whole-heartedly at Lancaster in line with the commitment to our city and region demonstrated in both the University strategy and library vision, and it was felt that loss of income was not that significant (and moving away from multiple membership schemes to one meant a reduction in administration costs).

However, community access to the library building may not work for other institutions – Lancaster University’s location outside of the city means that community members need to plan their visit (we are a bus-journey from the centre of Lancaster). For libraries located in city or town centres, community access may be problematic with anyone able to walk in, at any time of the day (especially with many university libraries open 24/7). At Lancaster we have put in access control to enter the building between 10pm and 6am to ensure security of the building.

It’s important to think about who the library is hoping to attract and to focus promotion of community schemes to targeted groups. We have worked closely with the External Stakeholder team and the Press Office at the university, ensuring that internal and external networks are used, and that there is visibility in what we are trying to do. Collaboration and partnership with individual community groups has been key – we have given value to our ambitions to support our community by curating and creating content that might be valuable to a local community group, for example, LBH.

Finally, my key takeaway is not to assume we know what the community want or need from the partnership with the library – put in time for conversations, listen and respond to feedback, and involve colleagues at all levels of the organisation.