A mural of Bristol civil rights hero Roy Hackett taken down by emergency services

Avon and Somerset Police were called to St Paul’s when rendering on the side of a building came loose. They then called on firefighters from Temple to join them in Byron Street after part of it fell and was deemed unsafe.

Four years in the making, The Seven Saints of St Pauls, features portraits of heroic Black Bristolians who fought for change. Roy Hackett was a leading organiser of the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott. In 1955 the local branch of the Transport and General Worker’s Union passed a resolution to ban ‘coloured’ people from working as conductors and drivers on Bristol’s buses. The employers, the privately owned Bristol Omnibus Company, turned a blind eye. Racial discrimination, which was legal, was rife.

A woman even said to me at the time, “How would you like change being put into your hand by a black hand?”

The Bristol Bus Boycott Campaign of 1963 was the nation’s first black-led campaign against racial discrimination and forced the company to reverse its policy. It marked a new chapter in the struggle for racial equality in Bristol and the UK and led the way to the Racial Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968.

Michele Curtis, the artist who created the project has vowed the mural will be repainted.