During the eighteenth century, sugar had become Bristol’s most important produce and, until the 1820s, cane sugar from the Caribbean was the city’s most valuable import. Lewin’s Mead is the last surviving of the twenty-something sugar refineries which dotted the city during the Romantic period. The remaining building formed part of a complex of a central courtyard, a 30 metre high chimney, boiler house and warehouse.
Parliament’s rejection of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade determined its supporters to boycott all commodities produced by slave labour. Sugar was, of course, one of the most important; and Coleridge and Tom Poole, both ardent supporters of the bill, renounced the use of sugar. To John Thelwall, who declined to take part, Coleridge wrote: ‘On the subject of using sugar, etc., I will write you a long and serious letter. This grieves me more than you [imagine]. I hope I shall be able by severe and unadorned reasoning to convince you you are wrong.’
In 1788, William Blackburn designed a chapel to be built adjacent to the refinary. The powerful Unitarian families of the Lewin’s Mead meeting house were often more influential than their Anglican counterparts. The chief scientific institution founded by this group, the Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science (1823), was highly exclusive and permeated the conservative culture of the predominantly Anglican bourgeois. A striking feature of the Bristol Institution lectures up to 1836, including speeches on natural history, zoology, human biology, flora and fauna, was the insistence on ‘creationist’ philosophy.