Join Peter Nicholls, co-founder of the Thames Estuary Sunken Slave Ships Project, for a walk and talk through Gravesend, from the Library and Archives to the site of a previously unrecognised slave ship wreck.
At the site, we’ll hear a story, informed by archival documents and Creole poetics, that reaches for what can be known or imagined about those trafficked on board, and traces the ship’s transition into an oceanic entanglement of wreckage that maps history and memory across a diasporic world.
From the shore of the Thames, we will return inland, following the recovered traces of the ship, until we arrive back at Gravesend Library and Archives.
This event is part of Exodus Crooks why live anywhere else?, which has been commissioned by Cement Fields and supported by Creative Estuary, Gravesham Borough Council, and Ebbsfleet Development Corporation through the Northfleet Place Partnership. With additional support from Northfleet School for Girls.
This event includes a 10-15 minute walk, a pause for 30 minutes, and another 10-15 minute walk back again.
Peter Nicholls is a historian and artist from Margate, of Indian Ocean Creole and British mixed heritage, whose work has stretched understandings of origins, memory and spirit across the saltwater realms of the South-western Indian Ocean and the Thames Estuary. Drawing on archival research, marine archaeology, oral histories, Creole music, spirituality and diasporic poetics, Peter’s work seeks reparative ways of reaching for silenced histories and has been featured by UNESCO’s Routes initiative, the universities of Seychelles, Mauritius and Kent, as well as museums, documentaries and collaborative projects in the Indian Ocean, Europe and the United States. Peter is co-founder of the Seychelles Origins Project and, alongside People Dem Collective, the Thames Estuary Sunken Slave Ships Project, which centres community, creativity and ancestral ties in uncovering unknown slave ship wrecks off the Kent coast.