Holnest, Dorset, UK

Demolished 1935

In 2023, I made a colonial-style dress out of sugar sachets to start a conversation around slavery, obesity and reward systems. During Black History Month, visitors made me aware that our South Dorset MP Sir Richard Erle-Drax owns vast quantities of land in Barbados and Dorset, based on his family’s slavery fortune, and his attitude to Barbados is particularly under local scrutiny. I was then told about his ancestor Erle-Drax and the mausoleum he built fifteen years before his death at Holnest Church in the Blackmore Vale, Dorset. He included a letter box through which he arranged to have The Times delivered daily. He dies in 1887. The sheer size, audacity and arrogance of it astounded me – and obviously others – who demolished it in 1935. The church yard path is still crooked where it had to go around the blob! Sophie M.