Can Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building escape its legacy of slavery?

Name: Wills Memorial Building.

Age: 92.

Appearance: Features a 65m-high gothic revival tower, clad in Bath and Clipstone stone.

Where is it? Bristol. It houses the university’s Schools of Law and Earth Science, and it’s where they do graduations.

Why is it called the Wills Memorial Building? It’s named after the university’s first chancellor, Henry Overton Wills III, whose money made the institution possible, but all that may be about to change.

He wants his money back? No, he died. But there’s a petition calling for the building to be renamed.

How come? Because of where his money came from. Wills was a member of the family firm WD & HO Wills, a Bristol-based tobacco importer and cigarette manufacturer.

I see – the building encourages smoking. No, this is about slavery. More specifically, this is about Wills “financing the university with slave-profited money” according to student protesters.

When? He left the university money in 1908, and the memorial building was completed in 1925.

I’m confused. Wills was born in 1828, five years before slavery was outlawed in Britain. But he worked at the family firm from 1846, when slaves were still being used to produce US tobacco.

This is like that campaign that got that statue of Cecil Rhodes pulled down at Oxford. The Rhodes statue is still there.

And rightly so. Many of our finest educational institutions were founded by bad hombres – stop whitewashing history. Whitewashing is not the point, according to the creators of a petition to change the building’s name. “We feel [it] should be named after an individual that we, as an institution and city, can be proud of,” said one.

Fine, name it after another eminent Bristolian of yore. The problem is, it’s hard to find historic Bristolians who weren’t connected to the slave trade. A concurrent campaign is seeking to change the name of the Colston Hall – a local concert venue named after slave trader Richard Colston.

What about Banksy? Surely he is in the clear. He’s quite difficult to contact.

What does the university say about all this? “To us, it would seem disingenuous to seek to deny or cover up our relationship with the family,” says a spokesman. “We would welcome the chance to discuss this further with the organisers of this petition.”

Do say: “You want Introduction to Geophysics, second floor, Massive Attack Hall.”

Don’t say: “Can I smoke in here?”