Hello and welcome to the Cotton Capital newsletter. I’m Nadine White and this month we’re asking: after the toppling, what comes next?Britain spent much of 2020 arguing about what should come down. Statues of enslavers and colonial figures were toppled, defaced or quietly removed. Edward Colston ended up in Bristol harbour. Robert Milligan was taken down outside London’s Museum of Docklands, while campaigners renewed calls for Cecil Rhodes to come off his plinth at Oriel College, Oxford. But six years on, one of the most persistent battles is still playing out.The longstanding Hackney MP Diane Abbott has highlighted ongoing calls for the removal of a statue of Robert Geffrye, the 17th-century merchant whose wealth was built partly through investments in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. The statue remains prominently displayed outside the Museum of the Home, formerly the Geffrye Museum, despite a 2020 public consultation finding strong support for its removal.Abbott argues that the issue is not about erasing history, but refusing to honour those who profited from slavery in public spaces. “We must never forget that,” she wrote. “But we must not honour it.”If you’ve walked through most British towns and cities recently, you’ll know the landscape hasn’t changed all that much. The vast majority of imperial monuments are exactly where they have always been: on plinths, in parks, above doorways and worked into the stone of public buildings.The toppling of Colston became globally symbolic precisely because it was so unusual.Elsewhere, changes were smaller and more localised: in the London borough of Lewisham, Sir Francis Drake primary school became Twin Oaks primary school after a community consultation; in Tottenham, north London, Black Boy Lane became La Rose Lane, honouring the Trinidadian-born activist and publisher John La Rose.So, six years on, a quieter question has started to emerge: what is actually replacing Britain’s imperial symbols?A different kind of interventionIntentional … The Wake, by Khaleb Brooks (right, with deputy London mayor Debbie Weekes-Bernard), is to be unveiled outside London Museum Docklands. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The GuardianAcross the country, a new memorial landscape is slowly taking shape, often pushed forward by artists, campaigners and community groups unwilling to wait for institutions to act.At the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the Black British-Caribbean artist Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark is creating iron entrance panels that reinterpret materials historically tied to enslavement and control. “Bronze and iron carry deep historical associations with the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans when they were used to confine, control and restrict,” she told me. “This project considers how those same materials can now be reclaimed and subverted within a contemporary context.”For D’Clark, artists have a particular role to play in how Britain faces its difficult histories. “Through their work, artists can help make visible stories that have often been hidden, overlooked or excluded from mainstream historical narratives.” This is a different kind of intervention to pulling something down, but no less intentional.In London, The Wake, a memorial honouring victims of the transatlantic slave trade by Khaleb Brooks, is due to be unveiled outside London Museum Docklands in 2027. Standing seven metres high, it will include a bronze cowrie shell that people can enter, offering a space for reflection.Meanwhile, campaigners are working to preserve and publicly display the anchor of HMT Empire Windrush, the passenger liner that brought one of the earliest large groups of postwar Caribbean migrants to Britain to help rebuild the country, turning a physical relic of migration into a national site of memory.These projects are unfolding against considerable resistance – one that’s worth taking seriously. A recent YouGov poll found that 60% of Britons oppose paying reparations for slavery, with 24% in support.At Oxford’s Oriel College, after years of campaigning, the Rhodes statue stayed put. The college opted instead for contextualisation – exhibitions and commissioned artwork exploring Rhodes’s legacy. Critics saw it as compromise dressed as engagement. Supporters argued it was more thoughtful than removal alone.In Glasgow, the city council confirmed in July that all 11 statues returning to the revamped George Square will come with material explaining their links to enslavement, colonialism and imperial conflict. The monuments – among them William Gladstone, Sir John Moore and Field Marshal Colin Campbell, who helped crush the 1857 Indian Rebellion – will form part of the city’s Legacy of Slavery and Colonialism Trail when the square reopens at the end of October.Internationally, the mood has also shifted in complicated directions. In the US, a new Christopher Columbus statue was recently installed at the White House using fragments of a monument toppled during the 2020 protests – a signal that the reassessment of empire is far from settled.What has changed, perhaps irreversibly, is that Britain can no longer treat its imperial symbols as neutral background scenery. Whether those symbols stay or go, they are now contested in a way they weren’t before.The question isn’t really whether empire should be remembered – it’s whose version of that memory we choose to keep and whose we’re still, quietly, walking past every day.Editor’s picks