In July 2020, in the immediate wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests, I was invited by Prof. Stephen Lovell, Head of the History Department at King's College London, to conduct some paid research on behalf of the university and its non-academic partners at Guys and St Thomas' Foundation Trust. I was hired to the project as an expert in the history of British colonialism and slavery, while my colleague Esther Brot was hired to explore the administrative history of the hospitals. Our 15,000-word research report into the slave trading activities of Thomas Guy and Robert Clayton in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries will enable the trustees of the Foundation to make an informed decision about the appropriate course of action to take regarding their statues, which currently stand in a prominent position within the grounds of the hospitals.

Our report is available to download and cite here.