Wilberforce House

Birthplace of the abolitionist William Wilberforce, now a museum about the slave trade and its abolition

Wilberforce House occupies a fine red-brick Jacobean merchant's house on High Street, opposite the Streetlife Museum. The displays trace the transatlantic slave trade in detail — including objects from the ships, the plantations, and the resistance — and then follow the long campaign that Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect led to end it. Upstairs, several rooms are furnished to suggest the family's domestic life in the 18th century, and there is a small permanent display on slavery in the present day.

The museum is free and forms part of the Museums Quarter, a stretch of High Street where four museums sit within a few hundred metres of each other. A small walled garden behind the house is a good place to pause between exhibits.

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A story
William Wilberforce was born in this house on High Street in 1759 and grew up in the rooms that now house the museum. He became MP for Yorkshire and led the parliamentary campaign that ended the British slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in the British Empire in 1833 — the Slavery Abolition Act passed three days before his death. The house opened as a museum in 1906, one of the first in Britain to be dedicated to social reform.