Public Participation in Renaming Processes: Navigating Sir John Hawkins

Debates about whether to remove, rename or ‘retain and explain’ monuments, buildings and street names play an important part in contemporary disputes about the construction and meaning of history. They also contribute to a significant cultural and socio-legal reassessment of Britain’s colonial and slave-trading past. We explore how two local governmental legal processes dealt with renaming controversies. More specifically, we examine the extent to which they facilitated consultation and what impact this had on local debates. In doing so, we ask how legal processes around renaming can be prefigured to generate more transformative understandings of controversial histories without further polarising the ‘culture war’. This exploration shines a critical light on the role of law in debates about Britain’s past and offers valuable lessons for future legal development.