During one of the Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol on June 7, the bronze statue of Edward Colston, an English merchant involved in the slave trade, was toppled and then thrown into the nearby Bristol Harbour. Later, Banksy took to Instagram to share a proposal for replacing the statue which in his words “caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t.”
“We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable around his neck, and commission some life-size bronze statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down,” Banksy suggests. “Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated.”
He even did a sketch representing how it would look like. 
Following up, the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, has suggested an alternative that the statue is likely to end up in a museum when it’s retrieved from the harbor, saying: “What’s happened to this statue is part of this city’s history and it’s part of that statue’s story.”
The toppling of the statue inspired London to remove another statue of a slave trader, Robert Milligan, from West India Quay on June 9, remarked the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.
UPDATE: The statue of slave trader Robert Milligan has now been removed from West India Quay.
It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade – but this does not have to be celebrated in our public spaces. #BlackLivesMatterpic.twitter.com/ca98capgnQ
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) June 9, 2020
