The No. 1 Building - St Helena's Slavery Memorial and Interpretation Centre
Please help us close the funding gap!
The No. 1 Building Project has received an incredibly generous grant of £165,000 from the Commonwealth Heritage Forum to pay for the historic restoration of the building and a training programme in heritage building skills. We've also had a very welcome grant of £10,000 from The Headley Trust to fund project development.
Planning consent has been awarded for the project, and we hope to begin work on site in September 2026. But we still need to raise £40,000 to fund the cost of utilities, services and fitting out of the building for use as an exhibition and interpretation centre.
If you can help with a donation, please do! All gifts are helpful, as they allow us demonstrate to other match funders the depth of international support for this important site of remembrance and learning.
The project in detail
The No. 1 Building Project is a community one, owned by the people of St Helena, and led by the St Helena National Trust. It centres on the No. 1 Building in Rupert’s Valley, which is the only surviving structure from St Helena’s role as a reception centre for slaving ships captured by the Royal Navy between 1840 and 1867. In these years, the Navy disembarked some 25,000 enslaved and trafficked Africans in St Helena, 8,000 of whom died and were buried there.
The project's objectives are to:
- Memorialise the liberated Africans who died in St Helena, many of whom had been trafficked from Angola and the Congo.
- Recover, tell and honour the experiences of the liberated Africans who remained in St Helena and those who were sent on as bonded labourers to the Caribbean, South America and South Africa.
- Educate people about the history and consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the history of slavery on St Helena.
The No. 1 Building was constructed in 1865 as an accommodation block to house up to 80 Africans released from slaving ships by the Royal Navy. Once restored, it will display 3D reproductions of artefacts exhumed from the old African burial grounds in 2008 (the original artefacts were reburied with their owners in 2022), as well as other objects and imagery relating to the history of slavery and abolition on St Helena. It will explore not only St Helena’s role in the abolition of the slave trade, but also the island's older, 250-year history of reliance on enslaved labour from Africa and Asia. The new centre will also host temporary exhibitions, community activities and conferences and, ultimately, a research facility.
Together the interpretation centre and nearby burial grounds will form a unique resource for raising awareness of this important but relatively unknown chapter in St Helenian, British and world history. It will enable St Helenians to learn about their own history - modern St Helenians are, in part, descendants of the more than 500 liberated Africans who settled permanently on the island - and for visitors to explore the complex history of slavery and abolition. It will be a fitting memorial to the thousands of trafficked Africans who died on St Helena and will help people understand the scale and gravity of the human suffering and international displacement from Africa that continued to occur in the decades after the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was outlawed.
We need your help to make the St Helena Slavery Memorial and Interpretation Centre a reality. Please donate now to help us restore this unique building and ensure that this important chapter in St Helena, UK and world history is not forgotten.
The reburial in 2022 of the remains of liberated Africans who had been exhumed in 2008 during archaeological investigations relating to St Helena's airport.