Unfairways

Recently, I became curious about whether Wells, my home city, had any connections to the transatlantic slave trade. I was shocked to discover that the street leading to where I spent the first ten years of my life was named after the Tudway family—owners of a sugar plantation in Antigua, worked by enslaved people.

Several grand buildings in Wells were built with the wealth generated by that plantation, yet nowhere in the city is this history acknowledged. There is no public recognition of the generations who profited from slavery, nor of those who suffered under it.

A local group, Wells and Transatlantic Slavery, exists to discuss reparations, but from what I’ve seen, their efforts feel largely symbolic. The deeper injustices remain unaddressed.

I thought ‘Unfairways’ would be a fitting alternative name for the road—highlighting the grotesque reality that when slavery was abolished, it was the enslavers who were compensated, not the enslaved. The debts from the Slave Compensation Act of 1837 were only paid off as recently as 2015. That such a system ever existed—let alone endured for so long—is beyond shameful.