Drawing on analysis of press reporting, museum display and a large-scale survey undertaken in Bristol in the aftermath of the 2020 toppling of the Colston statue, this article examines the shifting meanings given to the statue across a range of material and imagined sites. It works with two ways that history and geography intersect: the history of the sites/aftersites of this statue, and the materiality of histories in the sites/aftersites of this statue. Rather than the toppling of the Colston statue being a simple story of iconoclasm, a more complex historical geography was – and is – at play. As they imagined future aftersites for the Colston statue, people in the city saw this as an opportunity for some form of return of the statue – metaphorically if not materially – to one of its previous longer or shorter-lived homes. These former sites were seen to offer very different framings of the statue, as well as radically different ways of thinking about history. It is not simply historical geographers who are aware of the power of place in attributing meaning to statues. This can also be seen in popular responses to the afterlives, and aftersites, of the recent wave of fallen statues.

本文利用对新闻报道、博物馆展示和 2020 年科尔斯顿雕像倒塌后在布里斯托尔进行的大规模调查的分析，探讨了在一系列材料和想象场所中赋予雕像的不断变化的含义。它以历史和地理相交的两种方式起作用：这座雕像遗址/遗址的历史，以及这座雕像遗址/遗址中历史的物质性。科尔斯顿雕像的倒塌不是一个简单的偶像破坏故事，而是一个更复杂的历史地理在起作用。当他们为科尔斯顿雕像设想未来的遗迹时，这座城市的人们将此视为一个机会，可以将雕像以某种形式——如果不是物质上的——带回它以前寿命较长或寿命较短的房屋之一。这些旧址被认为提供了截然不同的雕像框架，以及截然不同的历史思考方式。不仅仅是历史地理学家意识到地点在赋予雕像意义方面的力量。这也可以从对最近倒塌雕像浪潮的来世和遗迹的流行反应中看出。