Artefacts stolen from city museum are irreplaceable, academic says

Evening Standard

More than 600 items stolen from a city museum are irreplaceable, an academic has said.Simon Potter, professor of modern history at the University of Bristol, said the items missing from Bristol Museums’ British Empire and Commonwealth collection are “unique” and of “huge value” to historians.Four men are believed to have gained entry to a building in the Cumberland Road area of Bristol, which houses the artefacts, between 1am and 2am on September 25.

Transcript

00:00So it's a very shocking event. This is a collection of national and international significance.

00:05It includes irreplaceable historical material from all around the world. It was collected

00:11as a unique collection really 20 or 30 years ago and it contains material from lots of

00:18different public institutions and private individuals. So really it's something quite

00:22unique and it's something that's a huge value if you want to understand the history of the

00:27British Empire, British colonialism, the history of many African and Asian countries in the

00:31Pacific so it really is quite a shocking development. These are items which I'm not

00:37sure the resale value of many of them is all that great but the cultural value of these items and

00:45the fact that they are unique and irreplaceable and that they form part of collections built up by

00:51major institutions like what was called the Colonial Institute, the Commonwealth Institute in London

00:56which was there to promote public understanding of empire. That in itself is something that

01:02scholars study and think about you know how these collections were used in the past for imperial

01:08purposes. If we lose that we lose our ability to understand large areas of the imperial history

01:14of Britain but also the colonial history of many countries in Africa and Asia and the Pacific.

01:20It's a real loss to our understanding of a really important aspect of the past if those

01:24collections aren't safeguarded.

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