The Buxton Table at which negotiations over the Abolition Act were hammered out will be just one of the displays in the London, Sugar and Slavery Gallery. © Museum in Docklands

What is London’s dirty big secret? What does a sweet cuppa have to do with a terrible crime against humanity? What product links 10 million enslaved Africans and London’s Dockers? How did English ladies and freedom fighters in the Caribbean find themselves united in struggle? Who really led the abolition campaign for the transatlantic slave trade? And what price freedom?

Once the fourth largest slaving port in the world, London’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade will be revealed on November 10 2007 when Museum in Docklands opens a new permanent gallery, London, Sugar & Slavery. Set in a former sugar warehouse built to store produce from the Caribbean plantations, the Museum is tangible evidence of London’s connections with slavery.

“We hope that the gallery will help Londoners from all backgrounds understand their own heritage and identity better,” said David Spence, Director of the Museum in Docklands.

“People may find it uncomfortable, but to grasp this is to begin to understand many facets of society today, including attitudes towards race and the melding of British, African and Caribbean cultures.”

The museum promise a gallery that will reveal an untold history, which joins the dots between ordinary Londoners with a taste for the sweeter things in life, arch-capitalism, despoiled West African civilizations and the thriving multicultural city we enjoy today.

Personal accounts, film, music, interactives and over 140 objects will bring home the complexities and humanity of the issues around the roaring trade in sugar and humans, slave resistance and the abolition campaign, and the legacies of the enduring relationship between London and the Caribbean.