Park in Brent could be renamed as part slavery review

A popular park in northwest London could be renamed as part of a push to replace place names associated with people who participated in the slave trade. After careful consideration, Gladstone Park in Dollis Hill, Brent, is now likely to be renamed to ‘Diane Abbott Park’ after the Labour Party MP.

Gladstone Park was named after four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone a year after he died in 1898. Although William Gladstone didn’t own any slaves himself, he came from a family of slave traders, with his father Sir John Gladstone owning around 2,500 slaves.

William Gladstone’s attitudes towards slavery changed later on in life, with him describing it as “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind”, but in his earlier years he openly opposed the immediate emancipation of slaves. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, William Gladstone helped his father obtain £106,769 in government compensation for the slaves he owned across nine plantations in the Caribbean.

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The renaming of Gladstone Park has been under discussion since 2020 when the Black Lives Matter protests first broke out in reaction to the US police killing of George Floyd. Brent Borough Council had asked schoolchildren to help come up with the new name after they were brief about the George Floyd murder and ‘systematic racism’ by a race expert.

After hearing many ideas from ‘BAME park’, ‘multi-faith park’, ‘diversity fields’, and ‘rainbow park’, pupils as young as five-years-old have suggested naming the 86-acre park after Labour MP Diane Abbott, the Daily Mail reported.

Diane Abbott has been the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987 and is the first black woman elected to Parliament. She is also the longest-serving black MP in the House of Commons.

The MP, who is of British Jamaican heritage, served in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Home Secretary from 2016 to 2020. She left the Shadow Cabinet after the 2019 general election, but she continues to fulfil her duties in the House of Commons as a backbencher.