Guerrilla Memorialisation in the Historic Judges’ Lodgings: Lela Harris’s Portraits and the Imaging of New Black Histories

Abstract

Lancaster’s polished veneer with its Georgian terraces populated with the finest locally produced mahogany furniture has always concealed dark secrets that are only now, with projects like Facing the Past, being fully exposed. In the UK’s fourth largest slave port, Lancaster’s merchant elite made their money in the business of slavery by investing in slave trading voyages or as slave ship captains. More widely though, many Lancastrians had interests in plantations across many islands in the West Indies or traded in slave-produced goods such as sugar, rum, cotton and mahogany. The variety of Black Lancastrian lives portrayed by Lela Harris so skilfully woven into the narrative of the Judges’ Lodgings and the wider Lancaster region, and the resilience shown by them all, stand in for the many we will never know about whose lives are not recoverable through the archives.