“Bristol, built on slavery.” That was the refrain that Kid Carpet played during one of his songs last month at St George’s, when he headlined Friday night of the Acoustic Music Festival. It was a reinvention of the Bristol Carpets advert, well-known to anyone who has ever listened to local radio stations.

Although sung over a beat supplemented by some Fisher Price electiric keyboards, Kid Carpet speaks the truth. From the late 1690s, hundreds of slave ships sailed from Bristol to the African coast. Bristol was already a wealthy trading city and port, but the slave trade brought even more riches here, controlled by the Society of the Merchant Venturers, a secretive organisation that still exists today.

Edward Colston (1636-1721) donated huge amounts of money to local causes such as schools in Bristol, but this money came predominantly from slavery.  As an official of the London-based Royal African Company, he was prominent in an organisation which had control of the British trade with Africa and the forts on the west coast of Africa. These were where the slaves could be collected and from where they could be sold by traders.

Colston’s name lives on today in Bristol, with his statue in the centre near the war memorial, and roads, schools, a tower and of course the concert hall named after him.

The Colston Hall’s links with Bristol’s murky past, however, means that Massive Attack, probably the biggest and most successful band ever to come from around these parts, refuse to play in the biggest venue in their home city. In a wide-ranging interview in the Crackerjack section of today’s Evening Post to promote their new album Heligoland, Robert Del Naja reveals that when Elbow played at the Colston Hall last year, he waited outside in their tourbus because he wouldn’t go inside.

Del Naja says: “I went to Colston Hall as a kid and saw loads of great bands there. But my thinking is that if they were going to spend all that money on the foyer they should have made a positive reference to the African heritage in the city that it’s intertwined with.

“It could be named the Colston Hall and the Freetown Centre, for instance. It’s not a matter of shame, it’s about a celebration by bringing the two cultures together.

“It’s not about a collective sense of guilt that people should feel, it should be positive and educate people through acknowledging what has gone on.

“Without naming names, I spoke to a national mover and shaker who was connected to the Capital of Culture competition. He told me that there were two reasons that Bristol didn’t win – the first was that the motorway divided the city into two but also it was Bristol’s refusal to deal with its slavery past. Whether that’s the truth or whether it is part of a rumour mill that has been exaggerated I don’t know, but it made a lot of sense to me.

“You’d see more people from St Paul’s and Easton etc in Colston Hall if there was a visible African connection to the building. At the moment, it just represents something totally un-African.

“One idea which I’ve been throwing around the pubs of the West Country would be to build a replica slaveship in Bristol docks.

“People come to Bristol looking for our history and it has been nowhere to be seen apart from the Breaking The Chains exhibition. If you’re an American schoolkid, for example, and you come over to visit Bristol and Bath there’s an interest – particularly at that age – in the macabre and bizarre things in history.

“The slave trade was one of the biggest disasters in human history but there’s no museum anywhere that I know of which deals with it. You shouldn’t Tippex a bit of our history out.”