page_title: Actions against memorials in the United Kingdom during the George Floyd protests
section_title: England
hierarchical_section_title: Actions against memorials in the United Kingdom during the George Floyd protests / England
caption_attribution_description: English: Cannizaro Park, The statue of Emperor Haile Selassie by Hilda Seligman
context_page_description: A number of statues and memorials have been the subject of protests and petitions during the George Floyd protests in the United Kingdom in 2020.
context_section_description: The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London, had graffiti sprayed on it over two successive days, including the phrase "Churchill was a racist"; this alludes to his controversial racial views. The memorial to Queen Victoria in Leeds was also vandalised. On 5 June, a group of protesters sprayed the abbreviation "ACAB", meaning All Cops Are Bastards, on the memorial to Earl Haig in Whitehall, London; when soldiers from the Household Cavalry in plain clothes scrubbed the graffiti off, protesters shouted abuse at them for doing so.
  The statue of Edward Colston in The Centre, Bristol, was toppled and thrown into Bristol Harbour on 7 June. On the same day, a protester climbed onto the Cenotaph in London and unsuccessfully attempted to set fire to the Union Flag.
  A sculpted head of a black man was removed from the 18th-century inn sign of the Green Man in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. The act was performed by residents of the town, who said that they had done so in order to protect it from vandalism. The sculpture was later returned to the local council, its legal owner.
  In Oxford, a crowd of protesters gathered outside Oriel College, demanding that its statue of Cecil Rhodes be removed.
  On 9 June the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced the formation of the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which would conduct a review of the capital's public landmarks. The Labour politician Lord Adonis asked the Government to begin a public consultation on the statue of Robert Clive outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That evening the statue of Robert Milligan, a merchant and slave trader, outside the Museum of London Docklands was removed following a request from the Canal & River Trust.
  On 11 June the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, the Guy's and St Thomas' Charity and King's College London issued a joint statement announcing that the statue of Robert Clayton at St Thomas' Hospital and that of Thomas Guy at the hospital named after him would be removed from public view.
  A statue of an exoticised black man in a kneeling position was removed from the forecourt of Dunham Massey Hall near Altrincham in Greater Manchester.
  A statue of Robert Baden-Powell in Poole, Dorset, was slated for temporary removal after criticism over events during his army career and his comments of support concerning Adolf Hitler and Mein Kampf, but initial attempts to remove it faced technical difficulties and local people later protected the statue from both council workers and activists.
  The Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy raised concerns about the Empire murals (1914–1921) by Sigismund Goetze in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in a letter to the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab.
  Following the toppling of the statue of Ras Makonnen, a functionary of the Ethiopian Empire,  in Harar, Ethiopia, a bust of his son Haile Selassie was toppled in Cannizaro Park, Wimbledon, South West London. Demonstrations had spread across Ethiopia following the murder of Oromo singer and activist Hachalu Hundessa on 29 June 2020. The bust in London was destroyed by Oromo activists.
  The statue of Robert Clive in Shrewsbury was the subject of two petitions in favour of its removal and one against; the first two combined received a greater number of signatures than the third. However, Shropshire County Council voted 28–17 against taking any action to remove the statue.
caption: The bust of Haile Selassie in Wimbledon, photographed in 2019
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