Turns out the museums are free, and on Tuesday I spent the afternoon at Merseyside Maritime Museum. I ended up in the Hello Sailor: Gay Life on the Ocean Wave exhibit. This became entertaining for all the wrong reasons when a group of scallies walked in, were taken aback by what they saw (Pictures! Of sailors! In dresses!) and ran off very quickly before things got too uncomfortable.
Then I visited the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery. In the 18th century, Liverpool was one of the biggest ports in the British Empire, in large part thanks to the slave trade, and this unfortunate part of the city’s history is something which needs to be dealt with and acknowledged.
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether there should be a formal apology from the UK for slavery, and after seeing exactly what African slaves were subjected to, I think some sort of gesture would be welcome. After all, short of building a time machine and stopping it from happening in the first place, there’s not a lot else we can do now.